User talk:Evad37/Archive 7

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Happy New Year, Evad37!

Happy New Year!

Evad37,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 00:00, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

Adding wikicode to CategoryTree display

In StripSearchSorted.js we added bullets and double square brackets for copying linked items straight off the page for pasting into an editor.

Now I've started ViewAsOutline-CategoryTree.js to do that in the Special:CategoryTree utility. But, the display starts out collapsed, with very few article names showing. Clicking on each category to expand them is very tedious, so I included a menu item to expand all of the categories at the same time (one level at a time) and another to collapse them (so far, all at once). There is also a menu item for adding wikilink formatting, and another to hide it.

The problem I've run into is, once you click on the Wikicodify menu item, further expanding and collapsing do not work. If you get the categories you want showing before you Wikicodify, you're fine. But if you don't, you have to reload the page and start all over again.

I think it has something to do with the "Brackets" class I added in this version. I stuck that class in there so that Wikicodify wouldn't match the entries that it already inserted link formatting into, so that it wouldn't insert it again. I was expecting to be able to further expand the category tree after the insert operation, but unexpectedly nothing happens when you click on the expand or collapse menu items after that.

When you have time, please take a look under the hood, and let me know what you make of it.

To help get the gist of the program, user instructions are posted at User_talk:The_Transhumanist/ViewAsOutline-CategoryTree.js#Description_/_instruction_manual

The Transhumanist 17:40, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

The category tree page works through javascript. You can see the source code here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/ECTR/browse/master/modules/ext.categoryTree.js

I've only taken a quick look, but I'd say the problem is with the cont.outerHTML = cont.outerHTML.replace... line. Rewriting the <a> tags is definitely not something the categoryTree.js expects. You might want to try only modifying the text within the <a> tags, and not the tags themselves. Or only adding stuff before and after the tags (i.e. with jQuery methods) and not rewriting the tags using regex. - Evad37 [talk] 15:07, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

Annual Top 50 Report

Hi Evad,

Given your position as editor-in-chief over at Signpost, and the time pressure regarding the specific item which I have nominated (the annual version of the Top 25 Report), I felt that it might be a good idea to alert you directly to the submission, as it diminishes in interest as the days go by.

Here it is.

Happy new year! - Stormy clouds (talk) 00:25, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Loading dependencies

By the way, do I need to load any dependencies for the following code?

 		// ============== activation filters ==============
	        // Only activate on Vector skin
	        if ( mw.config.get( 'skin' ) === 'vector' ) {

Do all "mw." lines have dependencies? The Transhumanist 13:40, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

mw.config is always available, and contains lots of other useful stuff – see mw:mw.config. Other mw modules, detailed at mw:ResourceLoader/Core modules, aren't necessarily available unless you load them – see mw:ResourceLoader/Migration_guide_(users)#mw.loader for further details. - Evad37 [talk] 14:10, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

Thank you. Reading them now. Also, I've added these links to User:The Transhumanist/Outline of scripts, for future reference. The Transhumanist 22:12, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Diffs

Hi Evad, I want to thank you for your diff viewer, and for being so kind to create it when someone asked. That was very nice of you. All the best, SarahSV ^(talk) 04:49, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

Progress report, and a big thank you

User talk:The Transhumanist/ViewAsOutline-AllPagesWithPrefix.js

This script disappears the bullets from the "All pages with prefix" page, and inserts wikicode formatting for list items for easy copying and pasting into a wiki-editor. Useful for building lists and outlines. The Transhumanist 05:31, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Created 2 more scripts, that make similar conversions to 2 other types of pages:

• User talk:The Transhumanist/ViewAsOutline-Book.js
• User talk:The Transhumanist/ViewAsOutline-Category.js

Made possible by your generous instructions. Thank you. The Transhumanist 08:05, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

P.S.: I was pleasantly surprised that .find creates an array.

Idea for Signpost arbitration report

There were two outspoken commentators at the Mister Wiki workshop with what looks to me like incompatible points of view. I'd like to ask each of them for a 250 word response/op-ed to include in the article (the article is about 500 words now). Is that kosher? ☆ Bri (talk) 20:40, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

@Bri: Yes, that's fine; differing perspectives on the same topic makes for better coverage. Just need to make sure they're are properly distinguished as opinions of the individual editors rather than the Signpost, since it will be included in the article, rather than as separate op-ed(s). - Evad37 [talk] 01:23, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Salvidrim! asked if he can contribute as well. I'm inclined to say "no" as it was just an invitation to two opposing views from the workshop participants, to make it digestible and not a re-litigation of the case. But I'd like to hear what you think of that request. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:58, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

@Bri: I think your instincts are right here; Salvidrim! can (and likely will) participate in the comments section after its published. - Evad37 [talk] 01:23, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

I didn't get text to include from TParis; he said he was thinking about how to respond. So if it misses the publication deadline it's your call whether to run with just Jytdog's op-ed, or to roll back to the revision without any op-ed content. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:07, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks Bri, I'll think about it. I'm not entirely sure when publication will be, real-life stuff keeps getting in the way :/ - Evad37 [talk] 03:11, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

How do you remove new lines from between elements?

For example, the Glossary of architecture has a newline between all the dt and dd elements (in the rendered output). More specifically, between "</dt>" and "<dd " in each glossary entry.

How do you get rid of just those newlines? (And no others).

I tried this, to replace the newline (and anything else between the elements) with " – ", and it didn't work:

// Strip out the newlines after dt elements
var mwContentLtr = document.getElementsByClassName( "mw-content-ltr" );
mwContentLtr[0].outerHTML = mwContentLtr[0].outerHTML.replace(/(<\/dt>).*?(<dd)/g,'$1 – $2');

Note that there is only one mw-content-ltr on the page. The Transhumanist 14:30, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: The dd and dt elements display like that because they are block elements [1]. Changing this to inline with jQuery $('dd, dt').css('display','inline'); gets rid of all the visual newlines... but that makes everything go onto one line, effectively. But you can add linebreaks after each dd: $('dd').after('<br>');. And to get the ndashes after each dt: $('dt').after(' – ');. And to remove the spacing before the dd elements: $('dd').css('margin-left','0');. So putting it all together into just two lines of code:

$('dt').css('display','inline').after(' – ');
$('dd').css({'display':'inline', 'margin-left':'0'}).after('<br>');

- Evad37 [talk] 04:03, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Works like magic. You're a wizard! Those block elements really had me stumped. Thank you. The Transhumanist 08:31, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

I want to make the bullets disappear

Dear Evad,

Happy Hollidays! I hope yours went well.

I've been spending mine banging my head against some new scripts. And I've run into an enigma...

I'd like to remove the bullets from unordered lists, and the following code doesn't have any effect:

// Make the bullets go bye bye
$( ".navbox").find( "ul" ).css( "list-style-type", "none" );

I also tried this:

// Make the bullets go bye bye
$( "ul" ).css( "list-style-type", "none" );

And it didn't work either.

Do you have any idea what I'm doing wrong? The Transhumanist 14:47, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: The bullets are defined using the ::after CSS pseudo element [2]. Which means that to override it, you have to add more CSS rules to the page. There is a handy function mw.util.addCSS() that you can use:

// Make the bullets go bye bye
mw.util.addCSS('.hlist dd:after, .hlist li:after { content: ""; }');

Should do the trick. You do need to make sure that mw.util is available, so you need to surround your script with:

// Load dependencies
mw.loader.using( ['mediawiki.util'], function () {

    // ... your script goes here ...

});

I typically put the mw.loader.using line after the $(function() { line - Evad37 [talk] 03:17, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

It didn't work, because hlist no longer exists. I'm not trying to remove bullets from horizontal lists. I had already removed the class hlist from all elements to force them to regular li format:

$( ".navbox").find( "*" ).removeClass( "hlist" );

Once they were converted to normal vertical lists, I wanted to remove the bullets. So I tried this, and it didn't work:

// Make the ul's targettable by adding a class to them
$( ".navbox").find( "ul" ).addClass( "navbox-ul" ); //this part worked

// Make the bullets go bye bye, by altering the elements' style
var elements = document.getElementsByClassName('navbox-ul');
elements.style.listStyleType="none";

I tried your line using navbox-list instead of hlist, but it also didn't work:

// Make the bullets go bye bye
mw.util.addCSS('.navbox-list dd:after, .navbox-list li:after { content: ""; }');

And I also tried this:

// Make the bullets go bye bye
$( ".navbox-ul" ).css( "list-style-type", "none" );

And it didn't work either, which was rather disappointing, since .css seemed like a pretty straight-forward jQuery method. The Transhumanist 13:40, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, I misunderstood what was going on. Your last block of code is pretty close, but you also need to set list-style-image: none; to override the image of a bullet that Vector uses by default. So that line should actually be

// Make the bullets go bye bye
$( ".navbox-ul" ).css( {"list-style-type":"none", "list-style-image":"none"} );

So your original code was pretty close too; its just that there are two css properties that control the bullets - Evad37 [talk] 14:29, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

Your solution worked! Thank you.

By the way, based on your explanation, I tried this, and it also worked:

// Make the bullets go bye bye
$( ".navbox-ul" ).css( "list-style-type", "none" );
$( ".navbox-ul" ).css( "list-style-image", "none" );

But this did not work:

// Make the bullets go bye bye, by altering the elements' style
var elements = document.getElementsByClassName('navbox-ul');
elements.style.listStyleType="none";
elements.style.listStyleImage="none";

I don't know why. The Transhumanist 12:32, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

How do you set all navboxes to the show state?

In the script above, I'd like to force all the navigation footers on the page to be uncollapsed. I've also run into this obstacle on another script, for working on pages like this, where I need the boxes expanded. How is that done in a script? The Transhumanist 07:51, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

I went back and looked at the HTML source more closely, after studying the .css method, and found "display: none". So I checked what was there when the boxes were displaying, and invoked that with this line of code:

// Force the navboxes to show
$('tr').css('display', 'table-row');

I'm guessing the .find method may allow this to be restricted to occurrences of tr within navboxes only. I'll keep you posted. The Transhumanist 07:09, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

It does. The Transhumanist 06:47, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

Forcing show state in sidebars

I've learned that looking at page source is a tricky business - it doesn't show the current state. Just looking at the page source isn't good enough; it turns out that other scripts (like NavFrame in mw:common.js) change the source after that picture is taken, requiring that you view selected source to see its current state.

So, while in "view page source" NavContent in a series box showed no indication of being collapsed (and so no code available to change), looking at the current page source (via "View Selection Source" in drop-down menu on right-click) reveals that some JavaScript came along afterward and added some styling (display: none). When expanded, that changes (to display: block).

So, I added a few "display; block"s of my own. :) Now I have a script, that among other things, forces all the content in sidebar and series boxes to be displayed, which is very useful for someone inspecting and collecting list components. Still needs refining of the formatting though. The script is ViewAsOutline-Sidebar.js.

This (acquiring JavaScript) is a grueling learning curve!

Do you have any suggestions that might make this journey easier? :) The Transhumanist 06:47, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

I always use "Inspect" (Chrome)/"Inspect Element" (Firefox) from the right-click menu, as that shows the HTML (technically the DOM, I think) in it's current state, and allows you to experiment with adding/changing/deleting bits of HTML/CSS and seeing the effects. The other tools in the same pane can also be useful, particular seeing an element's current styles, and where they come from. And the Console can show the value of variables if you use console.log(), and also evaluate snippets of Javascript you type into it. - Evad37 [talk] 04:42, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Very helpful script request + n00b

Hello, I'm Lingzhi. The regular FAC reviewers have some toilsome tasks that a script could make much easier. Would you be willing/available to make one? It would be greatly appreciated. Plus I was a Pick Basic and Python programmer, still hobbyist in latter, and I would like to help/learn with javascript. The request is on Mike Christie's page, check your pings... Thanks! Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 02:51, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Something within easier reach: adding TrueMatch to StripSearchSorted

I'm in the process of trying to fix the intitle bug in Wikipedia's search, by providing the solution as a function within StripSearchSorted.js.

The intitle bug is that when you enter a search phrase in WP's search box with a common word (like this: intitle:"in Germany"), the titles in the search results don't match.

I'm almost done, but I can't figure out how to get :contains to accept a variable:

        function TrueMatch() {
            // The purpose of this function is to filter out non-matches

            // Activation filter:
            // Run this function only if 'intitle:"' is in the page title
            // Notice the lone " after intitle:
            if (document.title.indexOf('intitle:"') != -1) {

                // Body of function
                // Create variable with page title
                var docTitle = document.title;

                // Display on screen for checking
                //alert ( docTitle );

                // Extract the intitle search string from the html page title
                // We want the part between the quotation marks
                var regexIntitle = new RegExp('intitle:"(.+?)(")(.*)','i');
                var intitle;
                intitle = docTitle.replace(regexIntitle,"$1");
                //alert ( intitle );
               
                // Filter out search results that do not match
                $( "li" ).not( 'li:contains(" + intitle + ")' ).remove();               
            }
        }

It works fine up until that last line. I want to remove all li elements that do not contain the text in the intitle variable. The Transhumanist 07:51, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Instead of passing a single string for the selector, you need to build a string up around the variable:

$( "li" ).not( 'li:contains("' + intitle + '")' ).remove();

The 'li:contains("' + intitle + '")' gets processed first, and the result is passed through to .not(). Or if you wanted to be a bit more explicit, you could do something like

var intitle_selector = 'li:contains("' + intitle + '")';
$( "li" ).not( intitle_selector ).remove();

- Evad37 [talk] 13:59, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

I tried both methods you posted above. I tested it on intitle:"of Australia". The script runs, and strips out the details as it is supposed to. And it is sorting the results. But it isn't removing the non-matches. It's like it's matching everything, and therefore removing nothing. (When it matches nothing, like in my version above, it removes everything, leaving the results blank). I reactivated the alerts, and those show up fine. It's still the last line that isn't working. When you replace it with $( "li" ).remove();, it removes all results. The Transhumanist 02:16, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Testing further on the "of Australia" search...

$( "li").not('li:contains( "of" )').remove(); resulted in blank results (ie, none).

$( "li").not('li:contains( of )').remove(); resulted in no matches (ie results unaffected).

So, it looks like the first one is matching nothing, causing all li elements to be removed, while the second one is matching everything, causing no li elements to be removed. The Transhumanist 03:11, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

I stared at the current page source, and discovered spans with the class "searchmatch", the contents of which appear to have been causing false matches. So, I blasted those with:

   // First, strip out the searchmatch class elements (they match).
  $( 'li').find( '.searchmatch').remove();

Then, with the above line in place, I tested your solution again, but it didn't work:

$( "li" ).not( 'li:contains("' + intitle + '")' ).remove();

The results turned up blank, which means it removed everything.

Ironically, doing the opposite works:

$( 'li:contains("' + intitle + '")').remove();

Unfortunately, this removes precisely the entries the user wants to keep. The Transhumanist 08:26, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

I think we need to be more specific, and target the main link of each result - since the value of intitle will be somewhere within the li, just not neccesarily in the title. Plus we can limit the searching of lis to just the search results, rather than the whole page:

// Mark true results with a class
$('.mw-search-results').find('li').has( 'div > a:contains("' + intitle + '")' ).addClass('truematch');
// Remove other results
$('.mw-search-results').find('li').not('.truematch').remove();

Which basically means: In the mw-search-results, find the lis which have a div that itself has (as a direct child element) an a that contains the text intitle, and add the class truematch to those lis. Then, in the mw-search-results, find the lis which do not have the class truematch, and remove them. - Evad37 [talk] 09:25, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

That did the trick. It works beautifully. Thank you.

This paves the way to the development of two related programs:

1. StripSearchFilter.js – will allow the user to enter additional search terms to filter down the results, including a term to keep or a term to discard. Can use it multiple times to further refine the result.
2. SearchSuite.js – will put selected features on their own switches so they can be turned on and off. Like the details stripping, and the inserted wikicode. It will also include the search filter feature mentioned above.

I'll keep you posted. The Transhumanist 11:28, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Leveraging TrueMatch data mining

This is very exciting. That's one more step in one of the city outline building approaches that gets sped up...

Step 1: Create city outline using template Template:Outline city  Done

Step 2: Find more links using True Match  Done and/or various ViewAsOutline scripts  Done

Step 3: Transfer links to outline (its holding section) via copy/paste  Done or Send (planned set of scripts)

Step 4: Dedupe the links in outline's holding section, using OutlineDedupeHolding.js (planned script)

Step 5: Use TopicPlacerFromBin.js (planned script) to move the links from the holding section to their final resting places in the outline.

Step 6: Process the outline with RedlinksRemover  Done

Steps 3, 4, and 5 are currently done manually, but 3 (copy/paste) isn't as tedious, so 4 and 5 have priority.

Since deduping is more complicated after links are placed, developing this first, makes the most sense.

Example of using the tools so far...

The Outline of Chicago is currently being drafted, using the above steps...

Step 1: See all the redlinks? Those are from the Template:Outline city. Many of the links in the template do not apply to Chicago, and so they turn red, but you never know what all is going to turn red when you first start a city outline, and they are time consuming to remove by hand. So, what we do is populate the outline with all the topics we can find, and then strip out the redlinks in step 6. The RedlinksRemover doesn't remove red entries that have children, it just delinks them. But, when the outline first starts out, most of the redlinks don't have children. If we strip them out too soon, we'll wind up having to type many of them back in when we find children topics for them.

Step 2: Here's where StripSearchSorted with TrueMatch comes in. You do some intitle searches, such as "in Chicago". Increase the limit in the url to 5,000 to get the maximum results you can at once. That produces the results here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=5000&offset=0&profile=default&search=intitle%3A%22of+Chicago%22&searchToken=bvc5dp6q7ldd4ayxph2a6ixg

Step 3: We copy and paste them to the "Place these" section in the outline (under See also). We repeat step 2 with further intitle searches (such as "of Chicago") and other gathering methods and send them all to "Place these" until we have all the topics we can find.

Step 4: The problem we have now is that many of the links in the "Place these" section are already in the body of the outline, like Culture of Chicago, Demographics of Chicago, and so on. And links may be duplicated in the "Place these" section itself. Therefore, we need to dedupe (remove the duplicates from) this section. That for each link in "Place these" that is found in the body of the outline (not navigation templates), or elsewhere in "Place these", gets removed.

Step 5: In this step, you take each of the topics one-by-one from the "Place these" section, after the duplicates have been removed, and put them into the body of the outline. Currently done by hand.

Step 6: Clean it all up with the RedlinksRemover. This tool is quick and painless – just click on the menu item. Without this tool, it is mind-numbingly tedious.

Design considerations for dedupe

Which brings us to the design of OutlineDedupeHolding.js.

Eventually, this will dedupe more than one section, but its initial version will just process entries in the "Place these" section.

For each item, it needs to check the rest of the outline, excluding templates, and including the rest of "Place these", for a matching entry. If a match is found, that item is deleted from "Place these". If no match, go on to the next item.

My question for you

I think this one may be within my ability level to write. I just need a little guidance...

How would you go about programming it? The Transhumanist 07:37, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Detecting duplicate links is a problem that has already been solved (for prose): User:Evad37/duplinks-alt. So I would suggest starting from there, and see if you can follow the approach that script takes – but you'll need to adapt it to look at wikitext rather than html, and to actually remove duplicated links. - Evad37 [talk] 08:28, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Come to think of it, it's not duplicate links that I need to remove, but list items (<li>) with a duplicate link in them.

Hmmm. Wikitext. That's it! Transcluded templates' contents don't show up in an outline's wikitext. And RedlinksRemover.js already strips out entire list items from the wikitext of outlines via regex, and it uses nested loops to do it. This one requires a nested loop solution too, I think. Looping through all the list items in "Place me", applying each as a search string in a nested loop processing all the list items in the rest of the outline, ought to handle the bulk of it. Then use a similar process to remove the duplicates within "Place me" itself (or do this step first). Thank you for the clue I needed. I'll let you know how it turns out. The Transhumanist 12:42, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

misunderstanding

no big deal JarrahTree 13:45, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Script request: annotation editor

Here's one that's beyond my current abilities...

I came across a script called User:The Evil IP address/hdedit.js (heading editor). It allows you to edit headings without opening the page or section editor.

I'd like this concept applied to editing list item annotations. List items are ubiquitous on outlines, stand-alone lists, and embedded lists, and their annotations typically follow the list items, on the same lines, starting with an en-dash, like this:

• this is a list item – this is its annotation

If a list item has an annotation, it should appear in the annotation editor for modification by the user. If a list item has no annotation, the script should pull in the first 2 sentences of the lead of the corresponding article, if the list item is an embedded link. Then the user can edit them (the 2 sentences) in the annotation editor for context and polishing. If there is no link, then an empty annotation editor should appear, ready for user input.

I was very excited when I found hdedit, figuring it could be easily tweaked to perform the function I desired, until I looked at the source. Even though it is in JavaScript, I couldn't understand hardly a byte of it. I don't even recognize the syntax being used.

Then I started hoping that this would be just the type of script writing challenge you could sink your teeth into.

Sincerely, The Transhumanist 11:52, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

This is a bit complicated, mainly because the script will need to have to have the user interacting with the rendered html page, and then track down the equivalent list items in the wikitext, and make the changes there. The headings script can do it relatively easily because each heading corresponds to a page section, and it can use section editing to replace the first heading in a given section. It will be much harder to track down arbitrary list items in the page wikitext. - Evad37 [talk] 03:30, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm not too concerned about the algorithm to find the item to be edited. If you could figure out how to create an editor that loads something from the body content in there, I'm sure we can figure out how to hone the program down to loading the right content. It's the program itself that has me baffled. So, even if the editor opens up and loads the wrong content, it will be a major step in the right direction. As for using section editing, perhaps a search for the first section preceding the item should work for determining which section to open?

In the meantime, I'll be playing catch-up, to be able to understand the source code. Any search terms or urls you could provide on the syntax or programming style being used, would be most helpful. I'm about to dive into JSON, so I at least understand how that integrates into scripts. Any insights you could provide as to how the script works, would help point me in the right direction. By the way, I do have some specific questions...

What programming style is being used in hdedit.js?

What does "window.hdedit" mean?

What is being chained?

And what is the technique that uses terms followed by a colon at the beginning of a statement called?

I've never seen that before. Do terms with a colon like that (e.g., "onclick:", "save:", "cancel:"), have a name?

As for the new program itself, can you fork the headings script and tweak it? You mentioned that the headings script uses section editing. But how does it know what you clicked on? Perhaps that provides the key to loading something else in there?

I look forward to reading your further insights. The Transhumanist 23:54, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

• I think its basically just procedural programming, but with functions stored in an object rather than being standalone functions – so it superficially looks a little bit like object-oriented programming (see also programming paradigm article).
• hdedit is an object, and it is placed on the native window object – but it probably could have also been declared with var hdedit = instead of window.hdedit.
• I'm not sure what you mean by What is being chained?
• As hdedit is an object, the syntax follows that of javascript objects – i.e. var foo = { 'key': 'value', 'key 2': 'value 2' }. But in this case, functions are used as the values rather than strings (and if the keys don't contain special characters like spaces, then the quotes can be omitted). Functions within objects are sometimes called methods.
• The part before the colon is usually called the key or the property, and its how you access the associated values stored within the object – with either square bracket notation: foo[key], or dot notation if there's no special characters: foo.key.

Creating what you want isn't going to be easy. The heading script finds out what wikitext needs to be modified by which sections headings correspond to, getting the wikitext for just that section, and then doing a regex find/replace of the first heading (thats the line hdedit.wikitext.replace(/^(=+)(\s*).+?(\s*)\1(\s*)$/m, '$1$2' + hdedit.newheading + '$3$1$4')). You can't do something that simple with list items, because regex like /^(\*+)(\s*).+?$/m would always match the first list item, not the one that needs to be changed. So then you need to find some other way of working out which list items in the wikitext match up with which list items rendered in the page HTML, which is where it starts getting complicated. - Evad37 [talk] 04:34, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

I thought hdedit was chained to window, and so I wondered what hdedit referred to. But chaining is only in jQuery. My mistake. It's a variable declaration? When you do that without var, does that make it global?

Thanks for the walk-through. That'll help with studying the script in more depth. Lots of search strings to google now. :)

Which leads me to a question: How does it put what you clicked on in a box for editing?

Concerning the nature of the endeavor, let me see if I have this straight...

1) Getting the desired text into an edit box is the easy part.

2) Once in an edit box, editing it is also rather easy.

3) Inserting it into the correct spot in the wikitext is the hard part.

Is that about right, or am I missing something? The Transhumanist 07:27, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

What about counting?

Would the 55th list item in the html view always be the 55th list item in the wikitext view? The Transhumanist 08:03, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Not necessarily, bullets can be generated through templates, or by placing <li>...</li> tags directly in the wikitext. Which would completely blow things up if you're just counting li tags in the html and lines begining with * in the wikitext. - Evad37 [talk] 02:45, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

So, you'd have to count every type of li in the wikitext? Do we know of all the types?

Is there a way to ignore templates, and focus only on the base page itself? The Transhumanist 00:13, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

grasping at straws

Hi. I've only been working with javascript for a couple days now (sorry, n00b alert). I am rather at my wits' end. I have no idea why User:Lingzhi/reviewsourcecheck.js (a fork of Ucucha's HarvErrors script, which I am also using concurrently) seems to work correctly on the Notes section for all articles, but on the References section it works for some articles but not others. I have spent literally hours and hours trying to walk through the history to see where the bug began... I can't ask you to comb through the whole thing, but... do you have any general thoughts? A million thanks... Oh and occasionally the error messages in the Notes section (generated by Ucucha's script) are duplicated, but if I clear the browser's cache, they usually but not always fix themselves... Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 00:17, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

No, sorry, it doesn't seem to work for the lower section in Ignaz Semmelweis either (sorry I described its behavior incorrectly), but Location works in the second sectin of Battle of Warsaw (1705). Maybe it's in the Firstname error section, which used to work... yes I really think it's there.... does "&" need to be escaped? Or is the loop logic screwy/infinite? Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 02:08, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

@Lingzhi: You've got some errors in your script, which is causing your script to terminate earlier than you expect. First, the var you declare on line 87 is srctxt, but then you're trying to using srctext on line 119, which is undefined. Secondly, you are missing a semicolon at the end of line 109. Thirdly, variables are scoped to functions, not other block structures like for. This means that in the second check, the variables 'i', 'srctxt', 'spline', and 'k' have already been defined from the first check.

The way I found these was (1) checking the browser console for errors; and (2) using a linter – I use Notepad++ as my text editor, which allows me to use JSHint for linting. The wiki software does have a code editor you can activate when editing a .js page (the "<>" button), with line numbering, syntax highlighting, and linting – but it only works properly if the page size is small enough. - Evad37 [talk] 02:17, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks! I will fix those... at the same time, I just now made a second script which is identical to the first, and deleted the very last section (which checks for archived text, and includes srctext, which you mentioned above). That fixes the problem entirely.. so it's probably srctext, as you mentioned.... THANKS! Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 02:20, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Yes many sleepless hours because of "srctxt" and "srctext... I have a second question: the very first link sometimes has duplicate errors, but if you cleach browser cache they go away. The second, shorter version below is expected:

Harv error: link to #CITEREFTrigger1980 doesn't point to any citation. Harv error: link to #CITEREFGreen1981 doesn't point to any citation. P/PP error: Green 1981, pp. 123; P/PP error: Champion 2009, pp. 121. Harv error: link to #CITEREFTrigger1980 doesn't point to any citation. Harv error: link to #CITEREFGreen1981 doesn't point to any citation.;

P/PP error: Green 1981, pp. 123; P/PP error: Champion 2009, pp. 121. Harv error: link to #CITEREFTrigger1980 doesn't point to any citation. Harv error: link to #CITEREFGreen1981 doesn't point to any citation.;

 Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 02:35, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, I really don't know what's going on there. Possibly it might depend on the whether your script gets loaded before or after Ucucha's. If it keeps hapenning, you might want to implement the Harv error checks in your own script, and use just that one script instead of both. - Evad37 [talk] 00:36, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

You are a light to the blind. Thanks! Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 00:41, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

A general question (tps welcome)

So I've been working on User:Lingzhi/reviewsourcecheck.js and made huge progress. I'm sure it could be made much much more elegant, but that's a task for another day. My question is this: There are no "red box with white x" errors, which I assume means "fatal errors". There are no little italic letter i warnings (information). There is only one yellow warning triangle with an exclamation point (what is the correct terminology for all these?)..

But alas, the fatal problem is this: the tooltip text (or whatever the correct term would be) for that one little yellow triangle says "Too many errors. (96% scanned)." And every section of the script works fairly well except for that section with the yellow warning, which is the lowest section of the script. When I debug, the logic all seems to work fine and I get into the place where I want to be, holding the information that I want to hold. But alas again, there is no output, even tho the "innerHTML" worked in earlier sections.

(Update: I made some edits and added a little more code; the yellow "Too many errors." triangle now appears higher up, at line 222sortedCites.sort();, but it is still the only error warning.) I have tried tweaking that section in every way I can imagine.

How can there be only one error, but that error says "Too many errors"?

As a note, I used to have many more yellow caution triangles, because I was re-declaring variables again and again... so I kept the "var" for the first instance (forex var i = 0), and for all later points I deleted the "var" (forex i = 0). Is that the wrench in the works? Or something else?

Thanks Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 05:15, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

The "too many errors" warning is a bug in the error checker itself... basically, for some reason it only read 96% of your code, and so can't show you if there are or aren't errors from that point on. I'm not sure of the exact trigger, but it does seem to be related to the size of the script – the larger a script is, the more likely it is to encoungter this bug, and the lower percentage scanned.

As for fixing the redeclaration of variables, I would tend to use different variable names, such as "j" or "ii" instead of reusing "i" – its a bit "cleaner", as you can't accidentally overwrite a value that a different part of your script may be expecting. Or have a value leftover from before when you are expecting no value (e.g. assigning a value only if some condition is true, and then later on checking if a value was assigned). Which admittedly isn't so important for smaller scripts, but can become a problem as scripts get bigger and more complicated. - Evad37 [talk] 00:30, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Please help - {{maplink}} question

Hello, I am trying to figure out how to use {{maplink}} with a GeoJSON data file. I was looking at documentation and testcases and still cannot figure out where exactly to put the data file.

Can you tell me the exact location of 'St Georges Terrace.map'? I'm quite confused in trying to locate this file to help me understand where to put my file.

{{Maplink||type=data|from=Sandbox/Evad37/St Georges Terrace.map}}

Here is a file I would like to map, but I don't even know how to test if it works on Wikipedia. c:High Point High School/Data:Boundary_Map.map I appreciate any help you can provide.~ Mellis (talk) 04:33, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

I figured it out, very satisfying. Got it working on High Point High School. ~ Mellis (talk) 05:21, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Extending WP:HIDEAWB to specific bot tasks...

Would it be possible to create a script similar to your HIDEAWB thing, but that would work for specific, user-defined edit summaries? AKA, something like

function setupHideBotTask() {
	// Add a class to list items with edit summaries containing specific strings/regex matches/whatever
	// Replace EXAMPLETEXT1/2/3 with your own strings/regex
	$( "a[title='EXAMPLETEXT1']" ).closest("li, tr").addClass("watchlist-bot-task-edit");
	$( "a[title='EXAMPLETEXT2']" ).closest("li, tr").addClass("watchlist-bot-task-edit");
	$( "a[title='EXAMPLETEXT3']" ).closest("li, tr").addClass("watchlist-bot-task-edit");

// 'Hidden by default' option
    if ( window.BotTaskHiddenByDefault ) {
        $(".watchlist-bot-task-edit").hide();
        $('#ca-BotTask').hide();
    } else {
        $('#ca-BotTask').hide();
    }
   
    $('#ca-BotTask').on('click', function() {
        $(".watchlist-bot-task-edit").hide();
        $('#ca-BotTask').show();
        $('#ca-BotTask').hide();
        return false;
    });
   
    $('#ca-BotTask').on('click', function() {
        $(".watchlist-bot-task-edit").show();
        $('#ca-BotTask').hide();
        $('#ca-BotTask').show();
        return false;
    });

}

if( mw.config.get('wgNamespaceNumber') === -1 ) {
    // Only operate in Special: namespace
    $.when( mw.loader.using( ['mediawiki.util'] ), $.ready).done( setupHideBotTask );
}

And maybe 'function setupHideBotTask()' is something that could be externalized to make things less intimidating for newbies / the main script being easily maintainable? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:27, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Still wondering about this.Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:04, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

@Headbomb: What you suggest is plausible, but not quite as simple as your code above (which would only find links to pages EXAMPLETEXT1/2/3). To do string/regex pattern matching the script would need to iterate through each edit summary and check if any of the supplied patterns match. Plus there needs to be code for storing/retrieving patterns, and an interface to add/edit/remove patterns. I'm also not sure how it would be performance-wise, especially if one ends up with a long list of regex patterns to check against each edit summary.
It also occurs to me that this sort of edit summary filtering is something that could be built into the software via the new filters for recent changes/watchlist (if the developers of that feature can be convinced to do so). - Evad37 [talk] 03:15, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

@Evad37: Well, we're basically at the brainstorming stage here, I know just about squat about JavaScript. The basic idea I had would be Part 1) "Detect this string [or possibly regex] in the edit summary" (example "\[\[User:JCW-CleanerBot#What is the bot approved for\?\|Task \dSA\]\]" would match Tasks 1SA/2SA/3SA/4SA, but not Tasks 1A/2A/3A/4A), and add the "watchlist-bot-task-edit" class to the corresponding item. Part 2) Make the item hideable in the same way WP:HIDEAWB does it.

If there are better ways of doing this, I'm all for them! Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 12:33, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

@Headbomb: Still thinking about this. One difficulty is going to be that a script won't have access to the wikitext that generated an edit summary, only the rendered html on the page.

Also, I suggested edit summary filters at mw:Topic:Tyx1apyyn9zqh0w3 (on mw:Talk:Edit Review Improvements/New filters for edit review) but they don't seem that keen on a free-form search filter. - Evad37 [talk] 03:04, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Well, rendered HTML is fine. If the script exist, then we can tell bot coders to prepend unique strings e.g. "JCW-CleanerBot Task 1" to their edit summaries. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:44, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

@Headbomb: I've got a basic version working at User:Evad37/Watchlist-hideCustom.js. The filters live in your userspace in a /WatchlistFilters.js subpage (e.g. mine is User:Evad37/WatchlistFilters.js), and at the moment need to be entered manually, between the lines window.watchlistFilters = [ and ]; – one per line, with a comma at the end of each line except the last (i.e. a javascript array). Each filter can either be a regular expression, or plain text inside quote marks. Let me know if you need any help. - Evad37 [talk] 09:02, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

New Page Reviewer Newsletter

Hello Evad37, thank you for your efforts in reviewing new pages!

The NPP backlog at the end of the drive with the number of unreviewed articles by creation date. Red is older than 90 days, orange is between 90 and 30 days old, and green is younger than 30 days.

Backlog update:

• The new page backlog is currently at 3819 unreviewed articles, with a further 6660 unreviewed redirects.
• We are very close to eliminating the backlog completely; please help by reviewing a few extra articles each day!

New Year Backlog Drive results:

• We made massive progress during the recent four weeks of the NPP Backlog Drive, during which the backlog reduced by nearly six thousand articles and the length of the backlog by almost 3 months!

General project update:

• ACTRIAL will end it's initial phase on the 14th of March. Our goal is to reduce the backlog significantly below the 90 day index point by the 14th of March. Please consider helping with this goal by reviewing a few additional pages a day.
• Reviewing redirects is an important and necessary part of New Page Patrol. Please read the guideline on appropriate redirects for advice on reviewing redirects. Inappropriate redirects can be re-targeted or nominated for deletion at RfD.

---

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here. 20:32, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Write output as new topic on article talk page?

• is there a way to write the output of a script as a new topic on the article's talk page, or GA or FAC review? Seems I've seen this done in WP:PR Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 23:21, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

To do that you need to use the mw:API, specifically mw:API:Edit. The easiest way I've found is using the mediawiki.api resource loader module. So you need to specify the dependency, i.e.

mw.loader.using( ['mediawiki.api'], function () {
// ...
// ... the rest of your script goes here ...
// ...
});

(see mw:ResourceLoader/Migration_guide_(users)#mw.loader for further details).
Then create an mw.api object, and identify your script/contact details. The same object can be used for multiple requests.

var API = new mw.Api( {
    ajax: {
        headers: { 
            'Api-User-Agent': 'Scriptname/version ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:.../Script )'
        }
    }
} );

Then, perhaps within a function, you can use the API to add text to a page:

function doEdit() {
    API.postWithToken( "edit", {
        action: "edit",
        title: "Wikipedia talk:Sandbox" // for example. You can use ` mw.config.get( "wgPageName" ) ` to get the current page name.
        appendtext: "This text will be appended to the page.",
        summary: "Edit summary goes here"
    } ).done( function() {
        // Code to execute if saved successfully
        // Maybe notify the user.
        // Or maybe reload the page:
        location.reload();
    } ).fail( function( code, jqxhr ) {
        // Edit failed. The reason will be in the code and/or jqxhr parameters...
        // (though you probably want to notify the user, rather than just logging to console)
        if ( code === "http" && jqxhr.textStatus === "error" ) {
            console.log( "HTTP error " + jqxhr.xhr.status );
        } else if ( code === "http" ) {
            console.log( "HTTP error: " + jqxhr.textStatus );
        } else if ( code === "ok-but-empty" ) {
            console.log( "Error: Got an empty response from the server" );
        } else {
            console.log( "API error: " + code );
        }
    } );
}

You can do something similar to prepend, overwrite, or add a new section, and you can specify a section number to work on. For other types of editing, it's a bit more complicated – you have to retrieve the current wikitext first, make your changes, and then send it back. - Evad37 [talk] 01:49, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

This is awesome, thank you. This stage of the script is still more than a little down the road, but I've found that copy/pasting the (sometimes extensive) output to a talk page can get very tedious very quickly. Thanks again! Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 03:28, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Activation filter for article namespace pages?

On some of my scripts, I use an activation filter that checks the title and runs only if the namespace up there matches:

	// Run this script only if "Book:" is in the page title
	if (document.title.indexOf( "Book:") != -1) {
		// (Body of script goes here)
	};

Now I need to do this with articles in the main namespace, but there is no prefix up there in the title to work off of.

What to do?    The Transhumanist 13:02, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) Test the namespace with conditions like mw.config.get( 'wgNamespaceNumber' ) === 0. — JJMC89 (T·C) 17:17, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Yep, you can do something like that, for any namespace (namespace numbers are listed at WP:NS). Or check for the inverse situation, so you don't have to nest everything inside an if statement:

	// Run this script only for main namespace
	if (mw.config.get('wgNamespaceNumber') !== 0) {
		return;
	};
    // (Body of script goes here)

The return statement only works within functions, but that's generally not a problem – you're whole script is usually wrapped inside a function, assuming you need to wait for the document ready and/or wait for resource loader modules to be loaded. - Evad37 [talk] 00:44, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Many of my scripts approach an insane level of if statement nesting. I definitely need to apply this return approach.

I think your program snippet above means "If the namespace is not 'zero', end the function." And "return" ends the program if the body of the script is in the same function, and at the same level (or deeper) in that function, as the if statement. Am I reading that right?    The Transhumanist 14:38, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Yes, the "return" ends the function it is immediately within at the point, and so the program resumes execution from the point where the function was invoked – but since we've wrapped the whole script in $( function($) {...}); there's nothing more left to execute, and so the script ends. It doesn't matter if the "return" is within any number of "if"/"if-else" statements, "for" loops, "while" loops, etc – only having another (sub)function will change the scope it applies to. One thing to watch for, at deeper levels within your programs, is that when you are assigning a variable to a function call (var foo = someFunction(bar);), the variable is set to the return value, which is specified with "return someValue;" inside the function. Since we haven't explicitly set a return value, it would be undefined – but that doesn't matter for our purpose, since the function is just there to make the script wait before executing, and is not assigning a value to a variable. - Evad37 [talk] 02:09, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you JJMC89 and Evad37.    The Transhumanist 14:38, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Based on your explanations above, I've written the following deactivation filters using return statements:

// ============== deactivation filters ==============

// End the script if Vector skin is not the user's skin
if ( mw.config.get( 'skin' ) !== 'vector' ) {
    // use a return statement to end the local function and hence the program's body
    // important: this approach does not work outside of a function
    return;
}

// End the script if " - Search results - Wikipedia" is not in the page title
if (document.title.indexOf(" - Search results - Wikipedia") == -1) {
    // use a return statement to end the local function and hence the program's body
    // important: this approach does not work outside of a function
    return;
}

Are these correct?

And am I using the correct terminology in my comments?

What is the common name for the above technique?    The Transhumanist 10:39, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

Looks fine to me. This technique is a guard clause (though I didn't actually know that till just now when I did some googling) - Evad37 [talk] 14:44, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

What about "or"?

What about doing the same thing for more than one namespace? Such as "run script if the page is in the article namespace or the template namespace"?    The Transhumanist 18:03, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: You just need to negate the logic to work out when to return. NOT( isArticle OR isTemplate ) is equivalent to isNotArticle AND isNotTemplate. So in script (and putting the actual namespace number into a variable to avoid duplication), you get something like:

	// Run this script only for main and template namespaces
    var namespaceNumber = mw.config.get('wgNamespaceNumber');
	if ( namespaceNumber !== 0 && namespaceNumber !== 10 ) {
		return;
	};
    // (Body of script goes here)

Or you could go a bit further and assign the condition to a variable, so you can name it (makes it easier to read, and remember what you were doing), and negate it later with the ! operator:

	// Run this script only for main and template namespaces
    var namespaceNumber = mw.config.get('wgNamespaceNumber');
    var isArticleOrTemplate = (namespaceNumber === 0 || namespaceNumber === 10);
	if ( !isArticleOrTemplate ) {
		return;
	};
    // (Body of script goes here)

And that's alright for a couple of namespaces, but if you need to do more, rather than keep adding more ORs or ANDs to the condition, you can use the array method indexOf for the logical test (which returns -1 if a value isn't in the array tested)

	// Run this script only for main and template namespaces
    var namespaceNumber = mw.config.get('wgNamespaceNumber');
    var allowedNamespaces = [0, 2, 10, 828]; // main, user, template, module
    var isInAllowedNamespace = (allowedNamespaces.indexOf(namespaceNumber) !== -1);
	if ( !isInAllowedNamespace ) {
		return;
	};
    // (Body of script goes here)

- Evad37 [talk] 23:59, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

btw

the meltham station was created by the blocked sockpuppet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/D47817 enough to delete with no hesitation or compunction, to say the least JarrahTree 02:44, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

some advice

the editors who used to help me with setting up project maintenance and so on have gone...

could you lead me to something or somebody who has the capacity to even get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Ageing_and_culture to square one? you can see on the project page that it started and more or less died without the requisite pages to even have a sense of what it is about I have tagged for many different projects - but have no idea who to ask or how to ask for the basics (some redlinked_)

any thoughts on or off wiki would be appreciated, thanks JarrahTree 23:47, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

@JarrahTree: I happened to be writing a reply above, and came across your post. I've started several WikiProjects, and currently curate WP:JS and WP:WPOOK. I suggest you start it over from scratch, following the instructions at Creating a WikiProject. But, only if you plan to curate it or be an active member. Without a curator or at least one active member, having a WikiProject is useless. It would just gather dust, until finally, someone will come along and slap an "inactive" tag on it. Are you planning on creating and maintaining the WikiProject? What kind of participation were you planning?    The Transhumanist 01:58, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

Not sure I agree - sometimes the tags can be useful, so recent changes or new articles or hot articles can be monitored. Even if a project is inactive. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:13, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

I like cas's response - as for the questions here, this is evad's talk page and I have simply asked for some clues about who can help with coding to fix up a simple part of an incomplete startup.

I am very sorry Transhumanist, thanks for the advice, but I very strongly disagree with most of what you say, thanks anyways for your effort. Please go to my talk page if you wish to ask questions or repeat those above there, thanks JarrahTree 11:36, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

---

I assume by "square one" you mean set up the project for class/importance assessments. To do this, you need to:

• Create the Wikipedia:WikiProject_Ageing_and_culture/Assessment page, with {{Grading scheme|Project=Ageing and culture}} and {{Importance scheme|topic=Ageing and culture}} (or similar listings and explanations of classes and importances).
• Create the categories for the redlinks generated by the Grading scheme / Importance scheme templates ...
  • Each -class one should have {{Articles by Quality|topic=Ageing and culture}} (or similar links to the other classes) and [[Category:WikiProject Ageing and culture articles by quality]]
  • Each -importance one should have {{Articles by Importance|topic=Ageing and culture}} (or similar links to the other importances) and [[Category:WikiProject Ageing and culture articles by importance]]
• Create the category tree:
  

- Category:WikiProject Ageing and culture
  - Category:WikiProject Ageing and culture articles
    - Category:WikiProject Ageing and culture articles by quality
    - Category:WikiProject Ageing and culture articles by importance

• Edit the project banner template to accept assessments – see the parameters and example at Template:WPBannerMeta#Assessment
• Set up article alerts, per Wikipedia:Article alerts/Subscribing

- Evad37 [talk] 09:44, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you - exactly what I was after, thank you - so there is no need for a template allowed editor to tweak anything then ? JarrahTree 10:05, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

Generally no, that would only be needed if the project banner was fully- or template-protected (which it isn't in this case). - Evad37 [talk] 10:08, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

inneresting - project template for tagging on talk page doesnt create anything that links or starts in the categories, is that because they dont exist yet? JarrahTree 11:58, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

The template needed to be updated, which I've done [3]. And talkpages might need to be WP:PURGEd or WP:NULL-edited to get it to take effect. - Evad37 [talk] 02:07, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

started - not sure when i can get back to it - some obvious blues already, but... JarrahTree 12:58, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

unbelievable mess - variant category names... grr... my bad. will cleanup. thanks for the leads, just a bit of a junk yard of misfiring cats, more rust and dust than in a wheatbelt rodeo ring JarrahTree 07:18, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Seeking words from the wise (you)...

Dear Evad,

I was wondering if you would, for the sake of helping a relative newb get up to speed, mind answering some questions about the sources of your JavaScript know-how, the practices you follow, and the tools you use...

Which JavaScript books have you studied that you recommend?

Which are your go-to JavaScript-related websites?

What tools do you use for script development?

What does a script/gadget developer for WP need to know about MediaWiki?

What is your approach for writing scripts?

How do you go about fixing bugs?

What were your hardest learned lessons?

If you were to start all over again, what would you do differently?

What other pointers can you provide?

What important questions did I not ask?

I look forward to your replies.

Sincerely,    The Transhumanist 14:37, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

• You don't know JS, very highly ranked in reviews, free to read online here Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 15:01, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
  • @Lingzhi: Thank you for the heads up. I've updated its entry at WP:JSRL, with links to each individual book. Feel free to add any further resources that you come across that are missing from this general resource list.    The Transhumanist 13:56, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist:

1. I haven't used any books – just websites, youtube videos, and looking at other people's code
2. MDN JavaScript References W3Schools JavaScript References, stackoverflow (usually from a google search), jQuery API documentation, Regex101 (with the "flavor" on the left set to javascript)
3. Notepad++ is my text editor with JSHint plugin for linting; and Chrome's devtools for debugging.
4. Not sure if these are 'need' to know - probably more 'good' to know:
   (a) Quite a bit of the hard work is done for you, with lots of info available in mw.config, and lots of function available in ResourceLoader modules
   (b) There are lots and lots of preferences and gadgets that change the way a page renders for users – what you see is not the same as everyone else, and you have to account for it if you want other people to be able to use your script. The main ones I've come across are skins, watchlist/recent changes preferences, and table of content preferences.
   (c) With just a little bit of care, scripts can be made to work across all wikis.
5. There's a few different approaches, and what works best really depends on the type of problem.
   • Currently, my preferred approach is to basically break the problem into a series of high-level steps. And depending on the complexity of the problem, those can be broken into a series of sub-steps. And so on, if needed. It can help to draw a flow-chart. Also, you can figure out what inputs each step needs, and the outputs it should produce. That basically forms a basis for writing the steps as functions. And substeps might be a series of logical steps within a function, or they might be subfunctions, or a higher-level function (to avoid code duplication if similar functions would otherwise have the same or very similar subfunctions).
     This fits in nicely with function-style programming, and if you follow the other functional programming concepts of immutable data (once a variable is set, you never change its value – instead you set a new variable to a changed value) and pure functions (functions only take in inputs, process the data, and return a value, without making any other changes to the state of the program), then your code can be easier to test and debug – because for a given input, each function is guaranteed to produce the same output.
     User:Evad37/TextDiff.js is a script where I took this approach.
   • Sometimes, it useful to work from an object orientated approach, where everything is a certain type ("class") of "object" – a blob of bits of data, with built in methods (functions) for setting/updating, retrieving, or doing something with those bits of data. So for example if you had a class for templates, the bits of data would be the template name, parameters names, and parameter values. This means that when modifying or using the data elsewhere in your code, you don't need to know the implementation for how to update a parameter value, or format it as a string of wikitext – you just use the methods from the object. So you might have some code like var someTemplate = new Template('name', {'para1':'value1', 'para2':'value2'}); and then later someTemplate.setParamValue('para1', 'foo'); to change the value set for 'para1'. And later someTemplate.makeWikitext(); to produce the string {{name|para1=foo|para2=value2}}.
     This separates the implementation from the usage, so that (a) its reusable, and debugging only needs to happen in one spot (b) its obvious that code like var newWikitext = someTemplate.makeWikitext() + currentWikitext; is adding the wikitext representation of the template to the start of the current wikitext (without concern as to how the template object is turned into wikitext).
     You also have something called "inheritance", where a more specific class of object can reuse the setup for a more general type of object, and just add some additional bits of data and methods. A template is a specific type of page, so you might have a more general Page class with methods such as making a wikilink to the page, that work for any type of page including templates.
     So with this sort of approach, you break the problem down breaks down into generating objects from inputs, working out how those objects are going to be manipulated, and then how you construct an output from those objects.
     User:Evad37/rater.js is a script where I took this approach.
   • A third approach is just to work out what steps need to be taken, and write the code sequentially to do just that – just storing data in variables, and without worrying about immutable data, pure functions, or objects and their classes. This is okay for simple scripts, but its actually much harder to do and maintain complicated scripts this way.
6. Think about where the bug may be coming from, and use Chrome's devtools to evaluate what's going at that point of the code: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/javascript/
   Or you can insert console.log() statements to find out what variable values are at certain points in the code, but you have to either be fairly certain of where the bug is coming from or litter them all over the place to try to catch the bug. (But the devtools debugger is more powerful, and easier since it doesn't require source code modifications that are purely for debugging)
7. Always test your code before deploying it. It doesn't take much to completely or partially break stuff. The way I work is to have a developental, sandbox version of the script at "scriptname/sandbox.js". Which starts off as a copy of the main script, maybe with a couple of overrides so it only edits pages in my userspace, or so that I see what the script would show an admin. Then I can make incremental changes to the sandbox.js version, without affecting anyone who has installed the main varsion of the script, and run it to see if the changes do what they were intended to do. More recently, I've started doing unit testing for my scripts in a /test.js file, but I'm still new to this sort of testing.
8. I'd try to do as much as possible in a functional style (once you get used to it, it just makes sense).
   • You can avoid deeply-nested if-else statements by doing some reverese logic – instead of checking conditions are met:

     function foo (whatever) {
         if ( condition1 ) {
             if ( condition2 ) {
                 if ( condition 3 ) {
                     //code if everything is okay
                 } else {
                     //code if #3 fails
                 }
             } else {
                 //code if #2 fails
             }
         } else {
             //code if #1 fails
         }
     }
     

     you check if conditions aren't met:

     function foo (whatever) {
         if ( !condition1 ) {
             //code if #1 fails. The return below stops any further code being processed.
             return;
         }
         if ( !condition2 ) {
             //code if #2 fails
             return;
         }
         if ( !condition3 ) {
             //code if #3 fails
             return;
         }
         //code if everything is okay
     }
     

   • A shorthand for if-else statements is the ternary operator, which is super useful when doing variable assignment:

     var foo;
     if ( condition ) {
         foo = 'isTrue';
     } else {
         foo = 'isFalse';
     }
     

     is equivalent to

     var foo = ( condition ) ? 'isTrue' : 'isFalse';
     

   • Similar shortcuts, called short-circuit evaluation, are also possible with the OR (||) and AND (&&) operators

     var x = a || b // evaluates to a if a is truthy, or b if a is falsey - ie IF (a) { x=a; } ELSE { x=b; }
     var y = a && b // evaluates to b if a is truthy, or b if a is falsey - ie IF (a) { y=b; } ELSE { y=a; }
     

   • jQuery isn't just for manipulating HTML (DOM) elements, there are some nifty utility functions – like $.each() and $.map(), which are similar to the native array methods, but work on objects as well.

That's probably just the tip of the iceberg, but its a bit hard answering such general questions. - Evad37 [talk] 09:52, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you.

This may take me awhile to digest, but no doubt, doing so will inspire more questions.

By the way, do you watch youtube videos with the commercials, or without? I've found viewpure.com a nice way to watch youtube videos, without those annoying distractions.    The Transhumanist 08:53, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

---

Impressive. I'll try to keep all that in mind as I program. Relating to your specific responses...

1) Concerning learning resources...

1a) You mentioned you haven't read any books on JS. I've been building a list of ebooks that are on-line legitimately for free, in case you are interested, at WP:JSRL.

1b) I hadn't even considered checking youtube for quality video tutorials until you mentioned it as a resource. So I went looking around, and found this interesting series called "Fun Fun Function", which deals with functional programming in JavaScript. Plus the guy acts nuts, to keep his viewers from falling asleep — a pretty good auxiliary service, if you ask me.

2) Of the webpages you mentioned, the only one I haven't used is Regex101. Thanks for the reference.

3) I use Linux mostly now, but I have Notepad++ installed as my default text editor on my windows machines. The equivalent on Linux is Notepadqq. I like the fact that these 2 programs save the user's work, even if the user doesn't. Though, for scripts, I primarily use the script editor installed on Wikipedia, to take advantage of WP's page version (edit history) feature.

4) Concerning the "good to know" stuff:

4a) The first time I took a look at the mw core documentation, my eyes glazed over. After going back several times, I discovered that most of the documentation is hidden, and that you have to unhide it for each item one-at-a-time. Whoever wrote those pages doesn't know much about efficient interfacing, which is ironic, as that is the API(nterface) documentation. (Which gives me an idea for another script).

4b) I admit I've shied away from the skin compatibility issue. I avoid the problem by making almost all my scripts check for and run only on the Vector skin, telling myself, "when I get the time, I'll go and test these in the other skins). Get more time? :) By the way, thanks for the heads up on watchlist and recent changes rendering. I've adopted the maintenance of a watchlist script called WatchlistSorter.js. I'll have to test it with the other watchlist settings activated. (I've been correcting perceived problems with it, and fortunately my "fixes" haven't broken it!).

4c) It seems to me, that to make sure scripts work on other wikis, they would have to be tested on other wikis. With my wish list of scripts to write being longer than my arm, I don't foresee ever having enough time to test anything anywhere other than on English Wikipedia.

5) Thank you for explaining your programming approaches. I'm not sure I use any or all of those - I mostly reuse code from all over the place, and as I go, more and more of it comes from my previously written scripts. My overall approach is rather informal, and therefore is probably in need of an upgrade. I treat writing scripts like writing a book. I think about what I want to write, pacing back and forth until I have it, and then sit down at the keyboard and plug it in. This usually entails thinking through what code I already have or have seen that can be applied to or modified for handling the current task. If I get stuck, I...

a) google the hell out of it, which usually takes me to stackoverflow, W3, or MDN;

b) read up on the underlying topics; and if neither of those steps work,

c) seek out a guru. :)

All three of these usually lead to a piece of sample code, which I plug in and modify. Because of this approach, I often wind up with source code that I don't even understand. It just magically works. And so, to catch up with my own scripts, I have been writing "walk-throughs" explaining each script element-by-element, expression-by-expression, and line-by-line, picking them apart as I go. This adds techniques to my mental toolbox, which in-turn reinforces this whole approach. If my memory of a technique fails me, I refer back to the walk-throughs. From time to time, I supplement this tinkertoy approach with study of the jargon I pick up along the way, and surveying the resource material available out there, building Outline of JavaScript, Glossary of JavaScript, and Outline of scripts as I go.

To tie all the activities of script development together to one place, I utilize each script's talk page as its workshop, pushing the talk page's original function to the bottom of the workshop. The workshop has sections for an intro, a manual, a walk-through, change log, bug list, features wish list, development notes, and last but not least, discussions. Resources I find, or relevant discussion threads that take place elsewhere, I copy to the workshop for convenient future reference.

6) So far, most of my bugs have been typos (caught by the editor) or of the kind that are of valid code but that do something unexpected. I save often when writing scripts, and so, when a script goes dead or wigs out, I can usually fix the problem just by reverting and trying again. That works especially well when you test (use) the script after every significant edit. This keeps bugs pretty isolated, most of the time. I haven't made the plunge to any devtools yet, but my scripts are getting longer and longer, and so it's only a matter of time before I will have to.

7) I noticed you and some others use a subpage to develop further versions on. Thanks for pointing out why you do that. I haven't posted any of the scripts I've written on the user script list yet, and so editing live hasn't muddled anybody up. By the way, I met an editor recently who applies your testing approach to articles by creating them in a sandbox, so that he doesn't have to do edit summaries. When finished, he just cuts and pastes the end result into article space.

8) Thanks for the pointer on avoiding deeply nested control structures. I've been slowly going through my scripts and swapping out the old code with a return; implementation.

On retrospect, the main thing I didn't think to ask is, "What are the goals of script writers?" I look around at the various scripts, and they all seem to pick away at the edges, but of what, I cannot tell.    The Transhumanist 18:10, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

"What are the goals of script writers?" – I don't know if there is any one answer, but in a lot of cases, its ultimately laziness. Computers are completely deterministic machines, and every step they take in executing a script could be undertaken by a human – but might be time-consuming, boring, hard, or beyond an individual's capabilities. So we create scripts/programs to fully or partially automate tasks, allowing them to be completed in a fraction of the time/effort that would otherwise be required. Which probably makes us more efficient in the overall number of tasks we can complete, but in terms of each individual task, we get to be lazy. And then you can get philosophical about what even is programming (e.g. this video [4]). - Evad37 [talk] 01:58, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Very interesting answer. For programmers in general, I can see that, now that you have pointed it out. What I meant above was "Wikipedia script writers", in the context of Wikipedia development. If they were all converging on something, what would that be? Is there an essence to it all? A grand prize? Complete laziness? What would that script (or set of scripts) look like or do? Another way to approach this query is from a forecasting perspective: "What will scripts on Wikipedia be capable of in 10 years?" If we could intuit that, perhaps it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It would probably be something I'd be interested in working on.    The Transhumanist 02:49, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

I guess for a Wikipedia context, the whole point of user scripts to provide functionality that the wiki software (MediaWiki core plus extensions) doesn't provide. So in some respects, the ultimate goal might be to have no need for user scripts, because all the awesome features our hearts desire would be already built into the wiki software. But that's not ever realistically likely to happen. And even if it did, the code would still exists, just be on the server side of things, and maybe written in a different programming language.

In terms of forecasting what the future might look like... basically, reading and editing merge into one experience. Whenever you read a wikipage, you can just click (or tap on a mobile device) and type in your edit. Everything that isn't pure adding/editing content is just another click and a form away (like Twinkle). However, it is incredibly easy to switch between this base mode and a power-user mode, which allows the raw wikitext to be edited – perhaps in a popup or some other split view, where changes to one are instantly updated in the other. There's a tonne of ai/machine-learning automation just happening in the background e.g. detecting the existing variety of English in an article and offering spelling correction for that version of English, regardless of the your device's language. Or suggesting alt text for images. Or suggesting categories. Or edit summaries. Or Wikiprojects. And probably lots of other things. All the backend stuff (templates, modules, portals, Wikiprojects, etc.) becomes centralised on a single wiki, like how images are mostly centralised on Commons. And maybe this gets merged with Wikidata and Commons into a single, multilingual, resources wiki.

But that's just what I think. And it's possibly a lot longer than 10 years away from now. - Evad37 [talk] 04:01, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

JS slowdown

Hey, would you have any tips on debugging what is slowing down my page loads? I've tried to isolate individual gadgets and common.js scripts but I'm going in circles. (Or would you know if there's something up with WP's sitewide JS?) I tried Chrome's dev tools "Sources" (edit: ah, meant "Network") tab but the userscripts all run the same length czar 01:33, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

You can try looking at a couple of other tabs in the devtools: "Network" will show the time taken to load content; "Performace" analyses the time taken to run scripts, broken down by individual functions. Reload the page after opening each of these tabs to get them running. (Documentation at https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/ ) . The other thing you could try would be to set up a fresh alternate account, and add/enable things one-by-one until the problem occurs. If that doesn't help, or you think the problem might be site-wide JS, you could ask at WP:VPT. - Evad37 [talk] 06:07, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Bug in Textual diff script

Evad37 Textual diff script malfunction

An error message as shown in the screenshot popped up when I pressed the button. Please look into it — Frc Rdl 07:36, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Took the plunge...

I removed the deactivation filter for vector skin from SearchSuite.js, and loaded it in common.js. It works on all skins, with the following quirk in MinervaNeue:

In the MinervaNeue skin, the features are stuck in whatever state they are in when the skin is selected. Unless there is a way to access the sidebar menu in this skin – if there is, please let me know.

By the way, is there a faster way to change skins than in "preferences"?     — The Transhumanist    11:58, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

Everything OK?

I'm just checking in. Seems you haven't been well lately. If you are indeed sick, I hope you will be in good health soon. I'll see you around. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 16:13, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

Search Suite...

...is now operational.

Thanks for your contributions and advice. The development of the script would have been substantially delayed without your support.

I did the best I could, though it is far from optimized.

What needs to be, or should be, done to it?    The Transhumanist 18:26, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

The main thing that's "wrong" with your code is your usage of localStorage. If for some reason localStorage isn't available (e.g. it is full, or the user has turned it off, or the user's browser doesn't have localStorage), it will throw up an error and stop executing your script. Any time you use localStorage storage, you should be using a try/catch structure, which looks like this:

try {
    // Code that might generate an error goes here
    // The script will execute up until an error occurs, at which point it moves to the catch block,
    // or until the end of the try block, at which point it skips the catch block
} catch(e) {
    // Code to execute if there is an error – i.e. if you can't read a value from localStorage, just assume a default value
    // The error details are in the `e` parameter, which you can output the browser console like this:
    console.warn(e);
}
// Script continues here, even if there was an error encountered in the try block

As for optimisation, it depends on what you mean. For speed/efficiency, that's pretty much taken care of by the browser. Most of the time, any optimisations you can make are on the order of milliseconds, which really don't matter unless you are doing millions of operations. What's more important to optimise how easily you can read, reason about, and make changes to your code. Which is actually a very, very, broad topic – look up "code refactoring" or "clean code" – but what I can think of at the moment is:

1. Make function and variable names meaningful, such that you don't need comments to understand what they do. Use sentence fragments, starting with a verb for functions. E.g. instead of TrueMatch, you could have something like removeResultsWithoutIntitleString()
2. Avoid having identical or near-identical code blocks – instead, create a function, which you you can pass a parameter into if needed to account for the slight differences
3. If your function is meant to be doing one thing (based on either name or comment), avoid doing other things in the same in the same function. E.g. your "Function to sort the search results" is also doing stuff related to menu items and localStorage. It would probably be better in a separate function that also gets called from SRSort().
4. The constant creating, removing, and recreating of menu items is a bit weird and unnecessary. Creating them is really part of the prep work. The rest of your program the just needs to be able to show and hide them from the user – i.e. using jQuery's .hide() and .show() – as appropriate. So initially that would be based on the localStorage values, and then updated each time SRWikify(), SRSort(), etc are called.

-Evad37 [talk] 04:36, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Hmmm. Try catch. So that's what TheDJ was talking about. (But he mentioned it in relation to mw module calls, like when they're not available for some reason). You make it seem to simple. Assume a default value. If local storage doesn't return a value, pick a mode. On or off. That makes sense. One try catch for each local storage variable? Five try catches are needed then?

I'm not sure I understand your last comment, as I couldn't think of any other way to implement a toggle. But I'll tinker around with it. Will work on the try catch thing first, though.

Thank you.    The Transhumanist 17:30, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Try catch, like this?

So, the program is just hanging in the breeze, waiting to crash?

I applied your code to variable assignments, like this:

        try {
            var SRSisterStatus = localStorage.getItem( 'SRSisterStatus' );
        } catch(e) {
            console.warn(e);
            var SRSisterStatus = "off" ;
        }
        try {
            var SRRedirectedStatus = localStorage.getItem( 'SRRedirectedStatus' );
        } catch(e) {
            console.warn(e);
            var SRRedirectedStatus = "off" ;
        }
        try {
            var SRDetailStatus = localStorage.getItem( 'SRDetailStatus' );
        } catch(e) {
            console.warn(e);
            var SRDetailStatus = "off" ;
        }
        try {
            var SRWikifyStatus = localStorage.getItem( 'SRWikifyStatus' );
        } catch(e) {
            console.warn(e);
            var SRWikifyStatus = "off" ;
        }
        try {
            var SRSortStatus = localStorage.getItem( ' SRSortStatus ' );
        } catch(e) {
            console.warn(e);
            var SRDetailStatus = "on" ;
        }

What is "e"?

What do I do with "e"?

That's a lot of repetition, how do you shrink that down?

Is try catch needed for instances of localStorage.setItem also?     — The Transhumanist    08:20, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Search filter

This is a feature I would like to add, to let the user further hone down the search results. I think TrueMatch could be cloned and adapted to do this, but in order to parse an additional search string, the program will need an input form. I've never done one of those before. Any guidance would be most helpful.    The Transhumanist 20:06, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

You can use the prompt() method to request user input. W3Schools has a couple of good examples: [5] - Evad37 [talk] 04:36, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

I was thinking about including fields for a string to include, a string not to include, and a checkbox for regex. :) I took a look at JWB to see if I could understand that source code, and it's in Greek!    The Transhumanist 17:04, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Let the user set the view limit

The search results have links at the bottom for setting the number of items to be displayed to 20, 50, and so on, up to 500. But the API allows setting at any number up to 5,000, with &limit=5000.

I'd like a menu item that allows the user to choose their own limit. Then the program would need to pass the &limit command to the API. I don't know how to do that.

Any pointers would certainly help.    The Transhumanist 20:06, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Again, you can use the prompt method, and then load a new url based on the current url using location.replace(url-string) - Evad37 [talk] 04:36, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

I was thinking in terms of a stored setting, but I guess local storage could be used in conjunction with this. Along with a try catch, of course. :) I'll give it a go.    The Transhumanist 18:06, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Projet JavaScript

Hi Evad37 , I would like to participate to the JS project. Could you please help me with process? Tools, documenattiosn and how task are organized? Thnaks for your help. --Mah3110 (talk) 10:45, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

MoveToDraft script may need updating before edit summary pings are deployed

Hey there! So phab:T32750 is going to be deployed next Thursday. With this, any edit summary that links to someone else's userpage will ping them. Looking at the code, I can't actually tell if your MoveToDraft script will be affected, but I wanted to give you a heads up just in case. Can the script be used to move userpage drafts to the Draft namespace? Anyhoo, disabling the pings is as easy as prefixing with a colon, like [[:User:MusikAnimal]], so you could safely put this before any wikilink in the edit summary and there will be no unwanted pings. If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask. Regards — MusikAnimal ^talk 00:37, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

User:Evad37/XFDcloser/v3.js may be affected as well (and perhaps other scripts of yours), should someone MfD a userpage. And to clarify, these updates to your scripts are only needed if you don't want them to ping. The decision of course is up to you :) — MusikAnimal ^talk 00:46, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

I understand you may not be doing well in real life :/ I'm sorry to hear this and you have my sympathies. Since I haven't heard back from you, I've gone ahead and made the above change with Special:Diff/830585089. I doubt we needed to add a colon for all of those links, but I did anyway just to be safe. Hope this OK. Get well soon!! :) — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:55, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

Reviewing a Wikipedian's article

Just want your quick opinion on a Signpost matter. Would it be kosher to review a Wikipedian's article that they wrote for a real-world history newsletter? Would this be topical for In The Media? The subject is coverage of specific historical content on Wikipedia. ☆ Bri (talk) 01:38, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

Chicken Soup for a Programmer's Soul

	Chicken Soup for a Programmer's Soul
	Hey, I have glimpsed a couple mentions of the fact that you be or might have been under the weather. I hope you're doing well. Have a nice warm bowl of chicken soup.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 07:10, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Move to draft

I apologise for making what might have been a disparaging remark posted on here. Do you think the message template could be shortened and made more clear? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:07, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Sure. Centralize discussion at User talk:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js. (Also "might have"? Really?) czar 01:18, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Hey, an apology is an apology, ok? That said, 'Move to Draft' is an essential piece of equipment. 06:22, 25 March 2018 (UTC)Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk)

YGM

Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:20, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

todo Global

Is it possible to use todo script on other sister and language projects? I added it on m:User:Titodutta/global.js and kn:ಸದಸ್ಯ:Titodutta/common.js. --Titodutta (talk) 22:20, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

New Page Review Newsletter No.10

Hello Evad37, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

ACTRIAL:

• ACTRIAL's six month experiment restricting new page creation to (auto)confirmed users ended on 14 March. As expected, a greatly increased number of unsuitable articles and candidates for deletion are showing up in the feed again, and the backlog has since increased already by ~30%. Please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day.

Paid editing

• Now that ACTRIAL is inoperative pending discussion, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary.

Subject-specific notability guidelines

• The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant BEFORE nominating an article for deletion.
• Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves with the new version of the notability guidelines for organisations and companies. A further discussion is currently taking place at: Can a subject specific guideline invalidate the General Notability Guideline?

Nominate competent users for Autopatrolled

• While patrolling articles, if you find an editor that is particularly competent at creating quality new articles, and that user has created more than 25 articles (rather than stubs), consider nominating them for the 'Autopatrolled' user right HERE.

News

• The next issue Wikipedia's newspaper The Signpost has now been published after a long delay. There are some articles in it, including ACTRIAL wrap-up that will be of special interest to New Page Reviewers. Don't hesitate to contribute to the comments sections. The Signpost is one of the best ways to stay up date with news and new developments - please consider subscribing to it. All editors of Wikipedia and associated projects are welcome to submit articles on any topic for consideration by the The Signpost's editorial team for the next issue.

---

To opt-out of future mailings, go here. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:06, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

Nomination of Portal:Australian roads for deletion

A proposal has been made to delete Portal:Australian roads, which you have made significant contributions to, as well as all other portals on English Wikipedia. You are welcome to contribute to the discussion if you'd like, which is located at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#RfC: Ending the system of portals. Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 11:21, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

Signpost issue dates set

Evad, I set next issue dates to 4/25 for writing deadline and 4/28 for publication. Thought you would want to know in case you didn't see the Newsroom update. Also, having published the March issue manually, am planning plan to use the publishing script this time, since now I know what to expect it to do.

Do you plan to be involved in the April issue? ☆ Bri (talk) 14:48, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

Hi Bri. Thanks for taking over at the Signpost. I'll get involved with some writing for the next issue, probably next week, but I don't really want the responsibility of organising it all. Cheers, - Evad37 [talk] 00:36, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Okay, no problem. We need an in-newsroom discussion around division of labor so I've kicked it off at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom#Contents and division of labor for April issue ☆ Bri (talk) 14:56, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Select Survey Invite

I'm working on a study of political motivations and how they affect editing. I'd like to ask you to take a survey. The survey should take no more than 1-2 minutes. Your survey responses will be kept private. Our project is documented at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_%2B_Politics.

Your survey Link: https://uchicago.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9S3JByWf57fXEkR?Q_DL=56np5HpEZWkMlr7_9S3JByWf57fXEkR_MLRP_cJbCbj99tqmYbTD&Q_CHL=gl

I am asking you to participate in this study because you are a frequent editor of pages on Wikipedia that are of political interest. We would like to learn about your experiences in dealing with editors of different political orientations.

Sincere thanks for your help! Porteclefs (talk) 12:38, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Upcoming changes to wikitext parsing

Hello,

There will be some changes to the way wikitext is parsed during the next few weeks. It will affect all namespaces. You can see a list of pages that may display incorrectly at Special:LintErrors. Since most of the easy problems have already been solved at the English Wikipedia, I am specifically contacting tech-savvy editors such as yourself with this one-time message, in the hope that you will be able to investigate the remaining high-priority pages during the next month.

There are approximately 10,000 articles (and many more non-article pages) with high-priority errors. The most important ones are the articles with misnested tags and table problems. Some of these involve templates, such as infoboxes, or the way the template is used in the article. In some cases, the "error" is a minor, unimportant difference in the visual appearance. In other cases, the results are undesirable. You can see a before-and-after comparison of any article by adding ?action=parsermigration-edit to the end of a link, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Foss?action=parsermigration-edit (which shows a difference in how {{infobox ship}} is parsed).

If you are interested in helping with this project, please see Wikipedia:Linter. There are also some basic instructions (and links to even more information) at https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2018-April/001836.html You can also leave a note at WT:Linter if you have questions.

Thank you for all the good things you do for the English Wikipedia. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:18, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

== wow

This geezer was born at the age of 117 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Slessor - which parameter has been completely -'ed up ? JarrahTree

Huh? - Evad37 [talk] 05:39, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

apology - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kenneth_Slessor&type=revision&diff=837656045&oldid=836030943 - I didnt see that age had been added to the birth (which had given him the age of 117 at birth :( ) - oops JarrahTree 05:55, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Signpost publishing

Requesting to be added as user of the Signpost publishing script ☆ Bri (talk) 03:03, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

@Bri:  Already done [6] - Evad37 [talk] 03:30, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Wow, ESP is real. Thanks, let's hope it works perfectly. ☆ Bri (talk) 03:43, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

@Bri: FYi, to make sure the script picks up on everything, each page you want to publish should:

• be a subpage of Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/
• have the same format in the top lines of wikitext (the <noinclude> ... </noinclude> section and following couple of lines) as the pages created from the newsroom "start article" button (i.e. traffic report or news and notes)
• similarly, have the same format for the bottom three lines:

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-end-v2}}
{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-article-end-v2}}
<noinclude>{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-comments-end|||}}</noinclude>

- Evad37 [talk] 04:07, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips, I had surmised the same from your documentation. Just one question, I am 99% sure the answer is affirmative but will ask anyway: only subpages of Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/ – equivalently, everything listed at Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Next_issue – will become part of the published issue, and nothing else. Correct? ☆ Bri (talk) 04:16, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Yes, everything listed there, and only there, will be available for publication. But you do get to choose, via checkboxes, which particular pages actually get published – e.g. if something should be postponed to the next issue, just untick the checkbox and it will be left as-is. - Evad37 [talk] 04:28, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Okay, making sure I understand what you mean by "the checkbox". The subpage must exist and the Signpost draft parameter ready be set to "Yes"? ☆ Bri (talk) 18:03, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

@Bri: No, I mean literal checkboxes within the script interface – see screenshots that I just uploaded. - Evad37 [talk] 01:10, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Everything seemed to work. Hoorah! The script cut down publishing to about 1 hour, which is nice. One request: could you look at the formatting at Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2018-04-26 to see if the script did something funky there? ☆ Bri (talk) 02:18, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Looking in to it now... - Evad37 [talk] 02:23, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

@Bri:  Fixed. The script worked perfectly, just one of the sub-templates wasn't properly set up for more than 14 stories. - Evad37 [talk] 02:40, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Ha, we broke it with too much content! That's a good problem to have. ☆ Bri (talk) 02:59, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

head up

so no need? re project tags on signpost talk pages? ok JarrahTree 03:40, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, it messes up the comment system. The talk pages get trascluded on to the article, so project tags would be displayed in the articles. Thanks, - Evad37 [talk] 03:43, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

apologies - every now and then some project space shows up a total disinterest in project maintenance - but I see your issue and will not touch again - sorry about that JarrahTree 03:53, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

No worries :) - Evad37 [talk] 03:57, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

In The News resources

Is there a spot you go to to find the going ons in Wikipedia ? Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 22:26, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

The Wikimedia-l mailing list discussions is the main spot [7]. Wikidata-related news can be found at d:Wikidata:Status updates. Sometimes there's something interesting on meta:Main page or WP:VPM. WMF announcements are at wmf:Press room, though they would usually also be sent to the mailing list. There's also the WMF blog, and community blog posts aggregated at Planet Wikimedia - Evad37 [talk] 00:10, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Also, m:Wikimedia News for project milestones - Evad37 [talk] 00:16, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

diff was useful for other pages

Once again I misread a situation - thanks for the revert JarrahTree 12:43, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Please - more or remove any intruding cats or project tags where necessary JarrahTree 13:21, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Coordinates in Maplink template

Hello Evad37,

I'm a contributor of the German Wikipedia and tried to transfer the Maplink template into our Wiki but I encountered a problem: The template you use for coordinates ({{Coord}}) is quite different in our German version. It seems to use a different coordinates format. Could you help me there? I don't have any LUA knowledge and I don't know how to fix it myself. --Doktorpixel14 (talk) 08:56, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

 Done - Evad37 [talk] 10:00, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Great, thanks --Doktorpixel14 (talk) 11:31, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

perth meetups

are primaily conducted as wiki club west events - which is the western australian branch of wikimedia australia chapter - which in effect makes them wmau events - JarrahTree 11:53, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

I added the logo to the box, and a note at the top of Wikipedia:Meetup/Perth - Evad37 [talk] 12:23, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Multi

Hi does multi qid works ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Naveenpf/Sandbox/map#Multi --naveenpf (talk) 01:25, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

The type is just line, not geoline. Fixed on your page - Evad37 [talk] 01:38, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you -- naveenpf (talk) 02:04, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

One more help I need, how to inverse India map from commons and map two relations from OSM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Naveenpf/Sandbox/map#India -- naveenpf (talk) 02:34, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

If the data comes from Commons, then all the styles come from Commons too (i.e. |type=shape-inverse only works with data from OSM). So to show an inverse of a Commons map, you would need to create a new one on Commons. Also if you are using |from= for the first feature, then the next feature to be mapped should be using |type2=, not |type=. - Evad37 [talk] 02:59, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Thanks --naveenpf (talk) 08:50, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Plea for help with modifying the Signpost article table

Hello! I'm currently getting desparate after trying to modify the Signpost article table. I've copied both /Tasks/Set and /Tasks/Task over to my userspace in order to play around with them, and am currently trying to change the default setup to what I have manually hacked into the table in my userspace overhaul of the Newsroom, so something like:

Name of the Feature, link to Next issue page if present Link to Content guidance Link to Resources Status:	Checklist: Title: Blurb: Ready for copyedit: Copyedit done: Discussion:

But I have absolutely no idea how on earth I could get this into the template. Got any help? Zarasophos (talk) 13:09, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

I'll take a look. I actually don't think we need the /Tasks/Set template, since all it does is pass stuff through to the other template. - Evad37 [talk] 15:06, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

@Zarasophos: Done - Evad37 [talk] 17:07, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Thanks a ton, it's looking great! I mentioned it on the Signpost talk page, let's hope it gets up a bit more enthusiasm for the overhaul... Zarasophos (talk) 21:48, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Overdue barnstar

		The Signpost Barnstar
		For everything you continue to do for The Signpost. Stepping in as Editor in Chief during a period of turmoil was gutsy and I appreciate it, also appreciate your onboarding me and others and helping the effort to get closer to self-sustaining. I just realized you haven't really been thanked before. ☆ Bri (talk) 17:04, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Strong support Zarasophos (talk) 21:48, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Publishing script problem?

I did a dry run of the publication script and got this error, and appeared to hang after the first screen.

index.php?title=User:Evad37/SPS.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript:123 
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property '1' of null
    at apiCallback_getInfo (index.php?title=User:Evad37/SPS.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript:123)
    at fire (load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki|mediawiki.legacy.wikibits&only=scripts&skin=modern&version=0upuj5q:46)
    at Object.fireWith [as resolveWith] (load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki|mediawiki.legacy.wikibits&only=scripts&skin=modern&version=0upuj5q:47)
    at Object.deferred.(anonymous function) [as resolve] (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki%7Cmediawiki.legacy.wikibits&only=scripts&skin=modern&version=0upuj5q:51:337)
    at Object.<anonymous> (<anonymous>:15:410)
    at fire (load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki|mediawiki.legacy.wikibits&only=scripts&skin=modern&version=0upuj5q:46)
    at Object.fireWith [as resolveWith] (load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki|mediawiki.legacy.wikibits&only=scripts&skin=modern&version=0upuj5q:47)
    at done (load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki|mediawiki.legacy.wikibits&only=scripts&skin=modern&version=0upuj5q:126)
    at XMLHttpRequest.<anonymous> (load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki|mediawiki.legacy.wikibits&only=scripts&skin=modern&version=0upuj5q:129)

It seems to be repeatable. @Chris troutman: you may want to follow this conversation ☆ Bri (talk) 18:35, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

@Bri and Chris troutman: The vote page from the last issue's poll was still in the /Next_issue pages, and it mucked up the script because it didn't have a {{Signpost draft}} template.  Fixed by moving it to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-04-26/Discussion report/Vote. - Evad37 [talk] 23:15, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

Phew, thanks! ☆ Bri (talk) 23:31, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

charles street

just tinkling around with things - please revert if wrong JarrahTree 04:29, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

many issues need to ask you about - first I am trying to copy from [8] and other pages - over to [9] and create a new relevant header - any thoughts ? JarrahTree 12:36, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

Mapframe doesn't work on mobile view

Just thought I'd let you know the mapframe doesn't show up in the Technology report for me, using Chrome running on an 8.4" Android tablet. There's just a blank space there with the open square "expand" icon. The access URL is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2018-05-24/Technology_report ☆ Bri (talk) 15:58, 24 May 2018 (UTC) ☆ Bri (talk) 15:58, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

Probably a bug with the mobile skin, possibly phab:T193347 or phab:T192251 or similar. For me, it works on iOS when using desktop view, but not with mobile view. - Evad37 [talk] 16:14, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.11 25 May 2018

Hello Evad37, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

ACTRIAL:

• WP:ACREQ has been implemented. The flow at the feed has dropped back to the levels during the trial. However, the backlog is on the rise again so please consider reviewing a few extra articles each day; a backlog approaching 5,000 is still far too high. An effort is also needed to ensure that older unsuitable older pages at the back of the queue do not get automatically indexed for Google.

Deletion tags

• Do bear in mind that articles in the feed showing the trash can icon may have been tagged by inexperienced or non NPR rights holders. They require your further verification.

Backlog drive:

• A backlog drive will take place from 10 through 20 June. Check out our talk page at WT:NPR for more details. NOTE: It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing. Despite our goal of reducing the backlog as much as possible, please do not rush while reviewing.

Editathons

• There will be a large increase in the number of editathons in June. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the 'move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.

Paid editing - new policy

• Now that ACTRIAL is ACREQ, please be sure to look for tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary. There is a new global WMF policy that requires paid editors to connect to their adverts.

Subject-specific notability guidelines

• The box at the right contains each of the subject-specific notability guidelines, please review any that are relevant BEFORE nominating an article for deletion.
• Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves with the new version of the notability guidelines for organisations and companies.

Not English

• A common issue: Pages not in English or poor, unattributed machine translations should not reside in main space even if they are stubs. Please ensure you are familiar with WP:NPPNE. Check in Google for the language and content, tag as required, then move to draft if they do have potential.

News

• Development is underway by the WMF on upgrades to the New Pages Feed, in particular ORES features that will help to identify COPYVIOs, and more granular options for selecting articles to review.
• The next issue of The Signpost has been published. The newspaper is one of the best ways to stay up to date with news and new developments. between our newsletters.

---

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:35, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

Since you are featured...

...in the latest edition of the Portals newsletter, I've posted you a copy below.    — The Transhumanist   00:50, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update, 25 May 2018

We have grown to 79 members.

Please provide a warm welcome to our latest additions, Wpgbrown, Cactus.man, JLJ001, and Wumbolo.

A lot is going on, much of it on the WikiProject's talk page, so be sure to go there and join in on any of the many discussions taking place there.

Elsewhere around the portal project, or related to portals, the following is happening...

New news template ready for testing

Evad37 has created a new template, with supporting lua module, to handle news in portals...

{{Transclude selected current events}} is ready to be tested in some actual portals. Let Evad37 know if you need help with the search patterns.

Noyster commented that "This is the best portal innovation since sliced bread!"

See the relevant discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals#Alternative to Wikinews.

Thank you, Evad.

Coming soon: Automatic article alerts (but there is a glitch)

Our WikiProject is now subscribed to the bot that makes automatic article alerts, but the subpage where they are posted has not been added to our WikiProject page yet because of a weird problem...

Featured portal nominations from two years ago keep popping up on there.

Please check Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/Article alerts to see if you can figure out how to fix this.

Once that is remedied, it will be posted on our WikiProject page.

Thank you.

Note that, this will only track base pages, because to track the rest, we'd have to create over 140,000 talk pages for the subpages, and that just isn't worthwhile (as we're trying to remove the subpages anyways). Therefore, any alerts for subpages will still need to be posted manually.

New portal, still needs work

• Portal:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, courtesy of Mozart834428196. See also, the discussion.

Drafting a new portals guideline

Your input/editing is welcome on the draft-in-progress of a new guideline for portals.

See or work on the draft at User:Cesdeva/sandbox11.

See also the discussion at: Wikipedia talk:Portal guidelines#RfC on new portal guidelines

RfC on new TOC layout for main portal list

There is a proposal to change the look of the table of contents at Portal:Contents/Portals.

See: Portal talk:Contents/Portals#RFC on layout update.

Deletion discussion survivors

Thank you to those who have participated in portal deletion discussions. There are still some editors out there who despise portals, and this comes across in their argumentation style. Wow. Such negativity. But, there is some good news...

• Portal:Quidditch survived its 2nd deletion nomination
• Portal:Prehistory of Antarctica did the same

Current deletion discussions are posted on our WikiProject page.

Portal space clean up

While portal detractors are trying to get rid of portals via MfD, we have deleted many of them via speedy deletion (per {{Db-p1}} or {{Db-p2}}). Essentially, they were bare skeletons, with maybe a little meat on them. The plus here is that speedy deletion is without prejudice to re-creating the portals. They can easily be restarted from scratch without getting approval, or be undeleted by request by someone willing to work on them. We have kept track of these, for when someone wants to rebuild them. They are listed at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet.

We are also removing subpages, the functions of which have been migrated to portal base pages. To see which ones have been removed, look for the redlinks in our watchlist.

There is also an MfD concerning some of these at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Redundant subpages of the Cornwall portal.

For subpages that need to be deleted, you can conveniently place this speedy deletion template at the top of each of them:

{{Db-g6|rationale=of subpage clean up – this subpage's function has been migrated to the portal base page and is no longer needed}}

Then an admin will come along and delete them.

Please help list the unlisted portals!

There are still 100 existing portals not yet presented on the main portal list at Portal:Contents/Portals. There were 400, so we've come a long way. Thank you! But we are not done yet...

Please list a couple of them. Every little bit helps. If each member of this project listed one more, it would almost all be done. Many hands make light work.

The list of missings, and instructions, are to be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet.

I hope to see you there!

Wrapping up

These developments make up just the tip of the iceberg. I'll have more to report in the next update, soon.    — The Transhumanist   00:50, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

You are invited to join...

I think everyone would enjoy it if you officially joined the Portals WikiProject.

Though morale is high, you joining would certainly boost it higher. ;)

And, you would receive a complementary subscription to our oddly irregular newsletter.    — The Transhumanist   00:50, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

 Done - Evad37 [talk] 00:59, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: This edit[10] should fix the article alerts problem, by telling the bot only to care about deletion and misc (i.e. requested move, rfc) alerts – per Wikipedia:Article alerts/Subscribing#Choosing workflows - Evad37 [talk] 01:07, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you.

Hey, you joined. Yeah!    — The Transhumanist   01:34, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Transclude Selected Current Event

Hi Evad37: The Transclude Selected Current Event was an excellent work. You are super awsome. One quaestion about the template - it looks like the template returns only current month news (or correct me if I am mistaken on this). Is it possible to parameterize how much old news the template will return? Some portals may one to show last 3 months for example. Arman ^(Talk) 05:44, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

@Armanaziz: The default is at most 6 items from the last 30 days, but both can be adjusted with the |max= and |days= parameters. There is a technical limit on how high the number can be, but such errors should only appear for very high values, like more than one or two years. - Evad37 [talk] 08:37, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

It's time: the Portals WikiProject AWBers are needed for a task...

I'm contacting you because you indicated on the Portals WikiProject's members list that you use AWB.

We are now working on a task that requires your help.

Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals#AWB team please tackle maintenance run on intro sections.

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   22:35, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

Signpost template help

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-05-24/From the editor is having trouble linking to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-04-26/From the editorss, probably becuase of the different SUBPAGENAME. Is there an elegant solution to this? ☆ Bri (talk) 16:49, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

@Bri: Maybe create a redirect at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-04-26/From the editors? - Evad37 [talk] 16:55, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Well, that is indeed elegant. I'll do that. ☆ Bri (talk) 16:55, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

sheesh

you look like you are saving the world.... just a query about whether I could get some help re-creating the SLWA project space into a new MoP space - see User:JarrahTree/MoP - any thoughts? I seem to be stuck on the header... JarrahTree 15:02, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Sure, what links do you want for the header tabs? - Evad37 [talk] 15:08, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

trying to link the pages across the top that show up in the original - as i want to replicate it fairly closely:-

[11] in the page layout of course - it is the contents that will change...JarrahTree 15:21, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

 Done. If or when the page in your userspace is ready, you should move it to Wikipedia:GLAM/Museum of Perth - Evad37 [talk] 15:52, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you - very much! I need about two more pages in the project space - is there an easy way to add? JarrahTree 00:39, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Just edit Wikipedia:GLAM/Museum of Perth/Tab header, and add more {{:Wikipedia:GLAM/Museum of Perth/Tab header/Tab|full page name|text to display on tab}} templates (next to the existing ones on that page) - Evad37 [talk] 01:07, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much for that advice - is there any chance of you being able to get to the Museum of Perth on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday between 9 and 4 - in the near future ?? JarrahTree 03:03, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

your message

got it - sorry about that JarrahTree

Thanks - Evad37 [talk] 15:08, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #007, 31 May 2018

We have grown to 89 members.

This is the seventh issue of this newsletter. For previous issues, see our newsletter archive.

Welcome

A warm welcome to our nearly one dozen new members...

Our new members include:

• Evad37
• Checkingfax
• Grey Wanderer
• Voceditenore
• TestPAKISTAN
• Godsy
• Greatedits1
• Charlesdrakew
• Ww2censor
• Simon Burchell
• TheGridExe

Be sure to say "hi" and welcome them to the team.

The portal set has shrunk

There were 1515 portals, but now we have 1475, because we speedy deleted a bunch of incompleted portals that had been sitting around for ages, that were empty shells or had very little content. Because they were speedied, they can be rebuilt from scratch without acquiring approval from WP:DRV.

Maintenance runs on the portals set have begun

This is what we have been gearing up for: upgrading the portals en masse, using AWB.

More than half of the Associated Wikimedia sections have been converted to no longer use a subpage. This chore will probably be completed over the next week or two. Many thanks to the WikiGnome Squad, who have added an Associated Wikimedia section to the many geography-related portals that lacked one. The rest of the subjects await. :)

The next maintenance drive will be on the intro sections. Notices have gone out to the WikiProjects for which one or more portals fall within their subject scope. Once enough time has elapsed for them to respond (1 week), AWB processing of intro sections will begin.

Thank you, you

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your part in the RfC. I went back and reread much of it. I believe your enthusiasm played a major part in turning the tide on there. I'm proud of all of you.

Why reread that mess, you ask?

To harvest ideas, and to keep the problems that need to be fixed firmly in mind. But, also to keep in touch. See below...

Thank yous all around

I've contacted all of the other opposers of the RfC proposal to delete portals, to thank them for their support, and to assure them that their decision was not made in vain. I updated them on our activities, provided the link to the interviews about this project in the Signpost, pointed out our newsletter archive so they can keep up-to-date with what we are doing, and I invited them all to come and have a look-see at our operations (on our talk page).

Sockpuppet, and reverting his work

It so happened that one of our members was a sockpuppet: JLJ001. According to the admin who blocked him, he was a particularly tricky long term abuser. This is a weird situation, since the user was quite helpful. He will be missed.

This has been somewhat disruptive, because admins are doing routine deletions of the pages (portals, templates, etc.) he created, and reversion of his edits (I don't know if they will be reverting all of them). Please bear with them, as they are only doing what is best in the long run.

The following pages have been deleted by the admins so far, that I know of:

• Portal:Plymouth
• Portal:Bedfordshire
• Portal:Suffolk
• Portal:Norfolk
• User:JLJ001/tag
• Template:Non-standard portal flag
• Template:Portal flag

Automation so far, section by section...

• Intro – {{Transclude lead excerpt}}
• Selected article – {{Transclude random excerpt}}
• In the news – {{Transclude selected current events}}
• Associated Wikimedia – {{Wikimedia for portals|species=no|voy=no}}
• Categories – {{#tag:categorytree|{{PAGENAME}}}}

Automatic article alerts is up and running

Automatic article alerts are now featured on the project page.

Some super out-of-date entries kept showing up on there, so posting it on the Project page was delayed. Thanks to Evad37 and AfroThundr for providing solutions on this one. Evad37 adjusted the workflow settings per Wikipedia:Article alerts/Subscribing#Choosing workflows, to make sure only the appropriate page types show up. AfroThundr removed the tags from the old entries that caused them to keep showing up in the article alerts.

Other things that could use some automation

Noyster pointed out that it would be nice to automate the updating of the portals section at the Community bulletin board.

Another major component of the portal system is the main list of portals, at Portal:Contents/Portals. How would we go about automating the updating of that?

Please post your ideas on the WikiProject's talk page. Thank you.

Deletion discussion survivors

Keep in mind that we have already speedy deleted almost all of the nearly empty portals, which can be rebuilt without approval whenever it is convenient to do so. Other portals should be completed if at all possible rather than delete them through MfD (which requires approval from Deletion review to rebuild).

• Portal:Juanes – see the discussion

(Current deletion discussions are posted on our WikiProject page).

Portals needing repair

• Portal:Toys

Wrapping up

There's still more, but it will have to wait until next issue.

Until then, see ya around the project.    — The Transhumanist   12:01, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Barnstar of Diplomacy
		Thank you for withdrawing your proposal when you found it lacked support, and taking criticism seriously. Your willingness to improve your work in response to others' suggestions, where many would become upset at criticism, is truly admirable, and something I wish more Wikipedians would adopt. Tamwin (talk) 04:21, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

Thanks

For fixing portal project project pages (hahah I like that) JarrahTree 09:25, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Re: cat class

Thanks for making one of those, it's been on my to-do list for a while now. Do you think you can also do one for the cat importance template? This would eliminate the need for the category redirects completely. Also the FPo button doesn't have a color. Perhaps it should match the old FA button? — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 17:01, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and created Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals/cat importance. Let me know what you think. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 23:16, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

@AfroThundr3007730: Thanks, looks good - Evad37 [talk] 01:17, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

And I've requested the "featured class" blue colour for FPo, see Template_talk:Class/colour#Protected_edit_request_on_4_June_2018 - Evad37 [talk] 01:18, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Template:Box-header

I'd like to post a sample portal box in the newsletter, which will go on user talk pages, but this template appears to be turning off section editing for the entire page. Could you see if it is feasible to alter this without adversely affecting portals?    — The Transhumanist   22:57, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist:  Already done, just make sure you use |EDIT=yes in {{Box-header}}. (Other variations of the template might need to adjusted to pass that parameter through.) - Evad37 [talk] 00:20, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #008, 7 June 2018

The WikiProject now has 92 participants, including 16 admins.

Welcome

A warm welcome to the newest members of the team:

• Keith D
• RL0919

Be sure to say hi.

Congrats

Pbsouthwood has just gotten through the grueling RfA process to become a Wikipedia administrator. Be sure to congratulate him.

The reason he went for it was: "For some time I expect to be busy with subpage deletion for Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals as mentioned above. The amount of work is expected to keep me busy for some time. I am primarly a content creator and contributor to policy discussions, but would be willing to consider other admin work on request, providing that I feel that my involvement would be appropriate and not too far outside my comfort zone."

New feature: Picture slideshow

Picture slideshow

• 
  Tower Bridge
• 
  Sacramento from near the Sacramento River
• 
  State Capitol Building
• 
  Capitol Mall, seen from the Capitol
• 
  Sacramento Memorial Auditorium
• 
  US Bank Tower
• 
  Old Town Sacramento, the capital as it looked like in 19th century
• 
  Pocket Sacramento Canal

Evad37 has figured out a way to let the user flip through pictures without purging the page. Purging is awkward because there is an intermediary confirmation screen that you have to click on "yes". In the new picture slideshow section, all you have to do is click on the > to go to the next picture or < to instantly show the previous feature. The feature also shuffles the pictures when the page is initiated, so that they are shown in a different order each time the user visits the page (or purges it).

It is featured in Portal:Sacramento, California. Check it out to the right.

Keep in mind that the feature is a beta version. Please share your comments on how to refine this feature, at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals#Refining the Picture slideshow.

The one-page portal has been achieved

We now have a one-page portal design. It isn't fully automated, nor is it even fully semi-automated, as there are still some manually filled-in areas. But it no longer requires any subpages in portal space, and that is a huge improvement. For example, Portal:Sacramento, California utilizes the one-page design concept. While is employs heavy use of templates, it does not have any subpages of its own.

I commend you for your teamwork

This is the most cooperative team I've ever seen. With a strong spirit of working together to get an important job done. Kudos to you.

In conclusion...

There's more. A lot more. But it will have to wait until next issue, but you don't have to wait. See what's going on at the WikiProject's talk page.    — The Transhumanist   02:09, 7 June 2018 (UTC)

AWB task requests, from the Portals WikiProject

1) Replace the intro box sections on portals with an upgrade. See details at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks#AWB task: converting/upgrading intro sections.

2) Replace categories box sections on portals with an upgrade. See details at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks#AWB task: Converting category sections.

Enjoy.    — The Transhumanist   08:08, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

Sunday meetup

VIP - heaps of questions. JarrahTree 01:30, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I'll be there - Evad37 [talk] 01:37, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Sorry I missed you

question for Friday 14th (only a slight distance from the 13th and black cats), basically WikiProject Mountains of the Alps - when it became its own project no one did much for the quality side of the process - in view of your fun and excitement with the portal project - is there an easy trip or journey or whatever into the hidden architecture of getting the bloody thing properly fleshed out to make the quality side of things actually show up when putting the tag wikiproject mountains of the alps up? at the moment it looks worse than what wikiproject ecoregions before it got the treatment... in the old days i used to get a now blocked high edit person in england who looks like not returning... tweaking and wrenching with the inner wiring and psyche of the tormented dilapilated projects requiring surgery of things - that eventuated in clean looking assessment category and project template inner world... I must stop dabbling in other peoples tormented projects, (I must repeat that to myself 100x), anyways any clues much appreciated, if not, no problems either.. JarrahTree 14:27, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

@JarrahTree:  Done [12], there's still a few categories to be created for the upper-quality and more obscure classes - Evad37 [talk] 14:42, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

wow that is far too kind of you - I really didnt expect such an instant solution - thank you so much JarrahTree 15:28, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

NPP Backlog Elimination Drive

Hello Evad37, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

We can see the light at the end of the tunnel: there are currently 2900 unreviewed articles, and 4000 unreviewed redirects.

Announcing the Backlog Elimination Drive!

• As a final push, we have decided to run a backlog elimination drive from the 20th to the 30th of June.
• Reviewers who review at least 50 articles or redirects will receive a Special Edition NPP Barnstar: . Those who review 100, 250, 500, or 1000 pages will also receive tiered awards: , , , .
• Please do not be hasty, take your time and fully review each page. It is extremely important that we focus on quality reviewing.

---

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)} 06:57, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #009, 15 June 2018

(Article slideshow prototype)
Selected animals

• 

  

  
  

  

  
  The dog (Canis familiaris or Canis lupus familiaris) is a domesticated descendant of the wolf. Also called the domestic dog, it is derived from extinct gray wolves, and the gray wolf is the dog's closest living relative. The dog was the first species to be domesticated by humans. Experts estimate that hunter-gatherers domesticated dogs more than 15,000 years ago, which was before the development of agriculture. Due to their long association with humans, dogs have expanded to a large number of domestic individuals and gained the ability to thrive on a starch-rich diet that would be inadequate for other canids.
  
  The dog has been selectively bred over millennia for various behaviors, sensory capabilities, and physical attributes. Dog breeds vary widely in shape, size, and color. They perform many roles for humans, such as hunting, herding, pulling loads, protection, assisting police and the military, companionship, therapy, and aiding disabled people. Over the millennia, dogs became uniquely adapted to human behavior, and the human–canine bond has been a topic of frequent study. This influence on human society has given them the sobriquet of "man's best friend". (Full article...)
• 

  

  
  

  

  
  The cat (Felis catus), commonly referred to as the domestic cat or house cat, is a small domesticated carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticed species in the family Felidae. Recent advances in archaeology and genetics have shown that the domestication of the cat occurred in the Near East around 7500 BC. It is commonly kept as a house pet and farm cat, but also ranges freely as a feral cat avoiding human contact. It is valued by humans for companionship and its ability to kill vermin. Its retractable claws are adapted to killing small prey like mice and rats. It has a strong, flexible body, quick reflexes, sharp teeth, and its night vision and sense of smell are well developed. It is a social species, but a solitary hunter and a crepuscular predator. Cat communication includes vocalizations like meowing, purring, trilling, hissing, growling, and grunting as well as cat body language. It can hear sounds too faint or too high in frequency for human ears, such as those made by small mammals. It also secretes and perceives pheromones.
  
  Female domestic cats can have kittens from spring to late autumn in temperate zones and throughout the year in equatorial regions, with litter sizes often ranging from two to five kittens. Domestic cats are bred and shown at events as registered pedigreed cats, a hobby known as cat fancy. Animal population control of cats may be achieved by spaying and neutering, but their proliferation and the abandonment of pets has resulted in large numbers of feral cats worldwide, contributing to the extinction of bird, mammal and reptile species.
  
  the domestic cat was the second most popular pet in the United States, with 95.6 million cats owned and around 42 million households owning at least one cat. In the United Kingdom, 26% of adults have a cat, with an estimated population of 10.9 million pet cats there were an estimated 220 million owned and 480 million stray cats in the world. (Full article...)
• 

  

  House mouse (Mus musculus)

  
  A mouse (<abbr title="
  '"`UNIQ--nowiki-0000007C-QINU`"'
  ">pl.: mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (Mus musculus). Mice are also popular as pets. In some places, certain kinds of field mice are locally common. They are known to invade homes for food and shelter.
  
  Mice are typically distinguished from rats by their size. Generally, when a muroid rodent is discovered, its common name includes the term mouse if it is smaller, or rat if it is larger. The common terms rat and mouse are not taxonomically specific. Typical mice are classified in the genus Mus, but the term mouse is not confined to members of Mus and can also apply to species from other genera such as the deer mouse (Peromyscus).
  
  Domestic mice sold as pets often differ substantially in size from the common house mouse. This is attributable to breeding and different conditions in the wild. The best-known strain of mouse is the white lab mouse. It has more uniform traits that are appropriate to its use in research. (Full article...)
• 

  

  
  The horse (Equus ferus caballus) is a domesticated, one-toed, hoofed mammal. It belongs to the taxonomic family Equidae and is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature, close to Eohippus, into the large, single-toed animal of today. Humans began domesticating horses around 4000 BCE, and their domestication is believed to have been widespread by 3000 BCE. Horses in the subspecies caballus are domesticated, although some domesticated populations live in the wild as feral horses. These feral populations are not true wild horses, which are horses that never have been domesticated and historically linked to the megafauna category of species. There is an extensive, specialized vocabulary used to describe equine-related concepts, covering everything from anatomy to life stages, size, colors, markings, breeds, locomotion, and behavior.
  
  Horses are adapted to run, allowing them to quickly escape predators, and possess an good sense of balance and a strong fight-or-flight response. Related to this need to flee from predators in the wild is an unusual trait: horses are able to sleep both standing up and lying down, with younger horses tending to sleep significantly more than adults. Female horses, called mares, carry their young for approximately 11 months and a young horse, called a foal, can stand and run shortly following birth. Most domesticated horses begin training under a saddle or in a harness between the ages of two and four. They reach full adult development by age five, and have an average lifespan of between 25 and 30 years.
  
  Horse breeds are loosely divided into three categories based on general temperament: spirited "hot bloods" with speed and endurance; "cold bloods", such as draft horses and some ponies, suitable for slow, heavy work; and "warmbloods", developed from crosses between hot bloods and cold bloods, often focusing on creating breeds for specific riding purposes, particularly in Europe. There are more than 300 breeds of horse in the world today, developed for many different uses. (Full article...)

Don't mind that box to the right. We'll be talking about that later, below.

Almost done...

With the portals upgrades?

No. :)

What is almost done is the updating of the main list of portals!

There are 23 portals left to be listed.

Kudos to the WikiGnome Squadron, for spearheading this.

Once it is fully updated, we need to keep it up to date. When you complete a portal, remember to add it to Portal:Contents/Portals.

Concerning portal upgrades, we are working on those section-by-section...

Associated Wikimedia section conversion task complete

The Associated Wikimedia sections of the entire set of portals have been upgraded. These are now handled on each portal base page (bypassing the previously used corresponding subpages), using the {{Wikimedia for portals}} template rather than reiterated copied/pasted code.

So, to be more accurate on reporting upgrade progress, that's one section down (for the whole set of portals), with (about) nine sections to go. (Skipping curated portals, regarding custom content sections, of course).

Further section conversions (using AWB)

Work is underway on converting Portals' introduction sections, and the categories sections.

If you would like to help, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Upgrade introduction sections and Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#AWB task: Convert category sections

Further section conversions (by hand)

Work has also started with converting selected picture sections to picture slideshow sections. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Install picture slideshows.

Quality rating system for portals under development

Currently, there is no quality rating for portals: in the Portals WikiProject box on each portals' talk page, it just says "Portal". But times are a changin'. Quality assessment is on the way, and you can help. See the discussion.

What's coming: excerpt slideshows

Evad37 has figured out a way to apply the picture slideshow feature to displaying article excerpts (now you can check out the provided box above). :) This allows us to bypass page purging to see the next selection, and you can even click through them rather quickly. Currently, the wikicode for doing this for article excerpts is a bit eye-boggling, and so we are looking into simplifying it. A streamlined version may be just around the corner.

Note that this is a prototype, not ready for widespread use. Click on the box in between the lesser than and greater than signs, to see what I mean. It was meant for pictures, and so the thumbnail feature doesn't apply to article prose very well. I've presented it even though it isn't ready, to show the direction portal development is heading. See the discussion.

Wow

I'm amazed at how rapidly portals are evolving. And we're still within a single generation of portal technological evolution. Imagine what they might be in 2 or 3 more generations of developments. Pretty soon, portals will be able to shake your hand. :)    — The Transhumanist   11:03, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, what we're doing now is just the beginning. We're going to be able to do a whole lot more interesting things when TemplateStyles gets enabled -- maybe even making {{Box-header}} obselete, or at least able to work with standard ==heading==s - Evad37 [talk] 11:36, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Help - lost in maze of twisty little templates

Can you help me fix the spelling error of "heroes" at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Archives/2018-05-24? I can't quite figure out where it's coming from. ☆ Bri (talk) 00:15, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

@Bri: It's coming from Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-05-24 - Evad37 [talk] 01:45, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

your fix

avon terrace york - good, for the centre point is it possible to resurrect the red bit... ? I was in town tonight trying to work out the config for lord street, perth - any clues? - not the centre point.. but the red line? JarrahTree 14:02, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

The data on OSM has the wrong type, see mw:Topic:Ufgoy5xiytiwfc2r (well, not wrong as such, just not one of the allowed types for wikimedia maps) - Evad37 [talk] 14:13, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

does that mean some fix is possible? JarrahTree 14:19, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

if not - the centre blue thingo now at avon terrace is close to useless (in agfand imho) - whereas your nice red thingoes at mitchell freeway look brillo - is there a potential compromise? JarrahTree 14:23, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

because of some issues that have arisen in some background work we are doing at Museum of Perth - I have developed a very strong aversion to the centre point blue blobs - as the specific tasks that we are aiming at in the street lists is to have centre points not in but more focus on the beginning and end points of the roads - is there are work around where they (the blue blobs) are not so whatever prominent? Because of a range of issues the end and beginning points and junctions/intersections are more important the way we are working with some info... JarrahTree 14:32, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

If there is not a default to the blue blob - surely there can be a work around -( it is so unhelpful and really contrary to what I was hoping for the perth street items) ... ? JarrahTree 14:39, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

It just needs some work on the OSM side of things, and then after that to wait about 24hrs for it to be updated here. The "blue blobs" at least provide some context in the mean time, rather than an empty map or no map. The workaround would be to do manual {{mapframe}} maps in the |location= rather than using the infobox's automated code (like what was previously at the Avon Terrrace article, except with the recognised data type on OSM) - Evad37 [talk] 14:42, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

OK I get that (suprisingly for me) wont be back at it now probably till next week when I am back at Museum of Perth again - but will probably try to ask you/get you/hope you are able to come in and meet the crew - (possibly just me and few other people there) with the background street thing, as I suspect your knowledge and understanding of the issues would be very very useful, if you were able to do so - thanks for your beefing up the lord street item - very much, it is appreciated... JarrahTree 14:49, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

Module:Excerpt and Template:Coord

Just to warn you that I made a small edit to Module:Excerpt without noticing that you'd just synced the sandbox. It's easily repeated in your new version if you choose to promote the sandbox to the live module. Certes (talk) 01:49, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Yeah I just saw that, done now. Thanks for the notification - Evad37 [talk] 01:52, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

yup

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wheatbelt_region_of_Western_Australia - is where the blue blob centrepoint system makes me see red. JarrahTree 00:24, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

The problem seems to be that there's nothing in OSM for the Wheatbelt, otherwise a shape would be shown as well as the marker like at c:Category:Western Australia - Evad37 [talk] 01:29, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

ok - I can see I need to learn a lot more about OSM - thanks for that JarrahTree 02:13, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

What'd y'all order a dead guy for?

You've got mail. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 20:40, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Signpost tech report - move to Commons

Interesting that "You will be able to move local wiki files to Commons..." just appeared in the tech report; I did a file move for the first time yesterday using one of the five listed tools for doing this. So I'm wondering if this feature will replace the existing modes? Or coexist? ☆ Bri (talk) 19:22, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

@Bri: The other tools should still work, as long as they are maintained, but this new built-in feature will probably become the preferred method since it will keep the page history and file history intact, including the move to Commons (and who moved it). - Evad37 [talk] 01:36, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, I think I'll add this tidbit to the tech report. ☆ Bri (talk) 03:38, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Talk page edits

Sorry, mate, lost track of what page I was on. My bad. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:03, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #010, 30 June 2018

We've grown to 94 participants.

A warm welcome to dcljr and Kpgjhpjm.

Rating system for portals

We are in the process of developing a rating system specifically for portals, as the quality assessment scheme for articles does not apply to portals. It is coming along nicely. Your input would be very helpful. See the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/General#Proposed new quality class assessments.

Better than a barnstar

One of our participants got involved with this WikiProject through interest in how the new generation of portals would be handled in WP's MOS (Manual of Style). It didn't take long before he got sucked in deeper. This has given him an opportunity to look around, and so, he has made an assessment of this WikiProject's operations:

I'm quite frankly really impressed and inspired by what's happening here. If you'd asked me a year ago if I thought portals should just be scrapped as a failed, dragged-out experiment, I would have said "yes". This planning and the progress toward making it all practical is exemplary of the wiki spirit, in particular of a happy service-to-readers puppy properly wagging its technological and editorial tail instead of the other way around, and without "drama". It's also one of the few examples I've seen in a long time of a new wikiproject actually doing something useful and fomenting constructive activity (instead of acting as a barrier to participation, and a canvassing/ownership farm for PoV pushers). Kudos all around. — SMcCandlish

Congratulations, everyone. Keep up the great work.

Slideshow development

We've run into a glitch with slideshows: they don't work on mobile devices.

Initially, we will need to explore options that allow portals to have slideshows without adversely affecting mobile viewers. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#Mobile view support.

Eventually, we may need another way to do slideshows. If we do go this route, and I don't see why we wouldn't, then (user configurable) automatic slideshows also become a possibility.

TemplateStyles RfC passed

Once implemented, this will allow editors to create and edit cascading style sheets for use with templates. This will expand what we can do with portals. For more detail, see mw:Extension:TemplateStyles and Wikipedia:TemplateStyles.

Automation effort

We've run into an obstacle using Lua-based selective transclusion: Lua is incapable (on Wikipedia) of reading in article names from categories. Because of this, we'll need to seek other approaches for fully automating the Selected article section. We are exploring sources other than categories, and other technologies besides Lua.

Speaking of using other sources, the template {{Transclude list item excerpt}} collects list items from a specified page, or from a section of that page, and transcludes the lead from a randomly selected link from that list. Courtesy of Certes. So, if you use this in a portal, and if the template specifies a page or section serviced by JL-Bot, you've now got yourself an automatically updated section in the portal. JL-Bot provides links to featured content and good articles, by subject.

What is "fully automated"? When you create a portal using a creation template, and the portal works thereafter without editor intervention, the portal is fully automated. That is, the portal is supported by features that fetch new content. If you have to add new article names every so often for it to display new content, then it is only semi-automated.

Currently, the Selected article section is semi-automated, because it requires that an editor supplies the names of the various articles for which excerpts are (automatically) displayed. For examples, look at the wikisource code of Portal:Reptiles, Portal:Ancient Tamil civilization, and Portal:Reference works.

So far, 3 sections are fully automatable: the introduction section, the categories section, and the Associated Wikimedia section.

Where is all this heading?

Henry.

Or some other name.

Eventually, the portal department will be a software program. And we won't have to do anything (unless we want to). Not even tell it what portals to create (unless we want to). It will just do it all (plus whatever else we want it to do). And we will of course give it good manners, and a name.

But, that is a few years off.

Until then, building portals is still (partially) up to us.    — The Transhumanist   13:31, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #011, 10 July 2018

We now have 97 participants.

Be sure to welcome our newest members, BrantleyIzMe, Coffeeandcrumbs, and Nolan Perry, with warm regards.

Work is proceeding apace. We have 2 major thrusts right now: converting the intro sections of portals, and building the components of the one-page automated model...

Converting the intro sections

We need everybody, except those building software components, to work on converting intros. If you have AWB, definitely use that. If not, then work on them manually. Even one a day, or as often as you can muster, will help a lot. There are only about 1,000 of them left to go, so if everyone chips in, it will go pretty quickly. Remember, there are 97 of us!

The intros for most of the portals starting with A through F have already been converted to use the {{Transclude lead excerpt}} template.

The standard wikicode for the automated intro that we want to put into place looks like this:

{{/box-header|Introduction|noedit=yes|}}
{{Transclude lead excerpt | {{PAGENAME}} | paragraphs=1-2 | files=1}}
{{Box-footer|[[{{PAGENAME}}|Read more...]]}}

That works for most portals, but not all. For some portals it requires some tweaking, and for others, we may have to use a different or more customized approach. Remember to visually inspect each portal you work on and make sure that it works before moving on to the next one.

Be sure to skip user-maintained portals. They are listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Portals#Specific_portal_maintainers.

AWB tips

I've started an AWB tips page, for those of you feeling a bit overwhelmed by that power user tool. Feel free to add to it and/or improve it.

Portal automation

We have some very talented Lua programmers, who are pushing the limits of what we can do in gathering data from Wikipedia's various namespaces and presenting it in portals. Due to their efforts, Lua is powering the selective transclusion core of our emerging automated portal design, in the form of selected article sections that rotate content, and slideshows.

To go beyond Lua's limits, to take full advantage of Mediawiki's API, we are in the midst of adding another programming language to the resources we shall be making use of: JavaScript. The ways that JavaScript can help us edit portals to boost the power of our Lua solutions, are being explored, which will likely make the two languages synergistic if not symbiotic. Research is under way on how we can use JavaScript to make some of the portal semi-automated features fully automatically self-updating, in ways that Lua cannot. Like gathering random members from a category and inserting them into a portal's templates as parameters. Once the parameters are in place, Lua does the rest.

If you would like to get involved with design efforts, or just keep up on them, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

When should we start building new portals?

Well, not at the present time, because building portals is quite time consuming. The good news is that we are working on a design that will be fully automated, or as close to that as we can get. And the new design is being implemented in the portal department's main portal creation template. This means, that not only will portals update themselves, their creation will be highly automated as well. That's the nature of templates. You put them in place, and they just... work.

What I'm getting at here, is that it would be better to wait to build lots of new portals until after the new design is completed. Because with it, instead of taking hours to create a new portal, it will likely take minutes.

That does not mean we should be idle in the meantime. The main reason most of us are here is because it became apparent that portals were largely unmaintained and had grown out-of-date. This had become so apparent that a proposal was made to delete all the portals and the portal namespace to boot. That makes our main objective in the short term to improve all the existing portals so that the community will want to keep them—forever.

Building lots of new portals comes later. Let's fix up the ones we have first. ;)

And on that note, I bid you adieu. Until next newsletter, see ya 'round the WikiProject.    — The Transhumanist   12:30, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

very late notice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Perth/50 - apologies for late notice - hope you are able to make it!! JarrahTree 04:28, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

thank you as always for your help JarrahTree 05:10, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #012, 15 July 2018

We have 97 participants.

Getting faster

Automation makes things go faster, even portal creation. One of the components Certes made was {{Transclude list item excerpt}}. I became curious about its possible applications.

So I worked out a portal design using it, the initial prototypes being Portal:Kyoto (without a "Selected pictures" section), and Portal:Dubai (with a "Selected pictures" section). Then I used Portal:Dubai as the basis for further portals of this type...

I was able to revamp Portal:Munich from start to finish in less than 22 minutes.

Portal:Dresden took about 19 minutes.

Portal:Athens took less than 17 minutes.

Did Portal:Florence in about 13 minutes.

Portal:Stockholm also in about 13.

Portal:Palermo approx. 12 minutes.

Why?

To see, and to show, what may become feasible via automation.

It now looks highly feasible that we could get portal construction time down to a few minutes, or maybe even down to a few seconds.

The singularity is just around the corner. :)

Slideshows

When using the {{Random slideshow}} template to display pictures, be sure to use the plural tense in the section title: "Selected pictures". That's because slideshows don't show up on many mobile devices. Instead the whole set of pictures is shown, hence the section title "Selected pictures", as it fits both situations.

In case you are curious, here is a list of the portals so far that have a slideshow:

• Algae
• Amphibians
• Anatomy
• Ancient Tamil civilization
• Athens
• Bangladesh.
• Berkshire
• Birds
• Buckinghamshire
• Cenozoic
• Dresden
• Dubai
• East Sussex
• Fish
• Florence
• Florida

• Genocide
• Gilgit-Baltistan
• H. P. Lovecraft
• Hampshire
• Human body
• Humanism
• Isle of Wight
• Kent
• London transport
• Mammals
• Milan
• Munich
• Oxfordshire
• Palermo
• Prague
• Reference works
• Reptiles

• Sacramento
• Saint Petersburg
• Salem
• Scottish Islands
• South East England
• Stockholm
• Surrey
• Sydney
• Tamil People
• Telephones (empty – please add some pictures)
• Turin
• Underwater diving
• Vienna
• West Sussex

Progress on intro conversions

The intros for most of the portals up through the letter "O" have been converted, using this wikicode:

{{/box-header|Introduction|noedit=yes|}}
{{Transclude lead excerpt | {{PAGENAME}} | paragraphs=1-2 | files=1}}
{{Box-footer|[[{{PAGENAME}}|Read more...]]}}

Where the pagename didn't match the article title for the subject, the title was typed in.

Most of the portals that do not contain {{/intro}} or {{{{FULLPGENAME}}/Intro}} have not yet been processed.

About a thousand portals use the method of selective transclusion for the intro section. That's about two-thirds. That means we have one-third of the way to go on the intro section conversions.

Much more to come...

So much has been happening with portals that I can't keep up with it. (That's good). Which means, more in the upcoming issue. Until then, see ya 'round the project. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   08:45, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Draftifying template user message

Moved to User talk:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js/Archives/ 1#Draftifying template user message

 – - Evad37 [talk] 01:49, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #013, 18 July 2018

I got overwhelmed IRL (in real life) during the production of issue #12. So, here is a catch-up issue, to help bring you (and me) up to speed on what is happening with portals...

By the way, we still have 97 participants. (Tell all your friends about this WikiProject, and have them join!)

Panoramas!

One cool feature of some of the geographical portals is a panoramic picture at the top of the intro section.

Check these out:

• Portal:Kyoto
• Portal:Miami
• Portal:Seattle
• Portal:Houston
• Portal:Tokyo
• Portal:New Orleans
• Portal:Brisbane
• Portal:Calgary
• Portal:Moscow

The Portals WikiGnome squadron is busy adding panoramas to geographical portals that don't yet have one. Feel free to join in on the fun. See task details at Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Add a panorama or skyline to a geographic portal.

Caveat: avoid super-huge pics, as they can cause portal scripts to time-out. Please try to keep picture size down below 2 megabytes. Thank you.

Auto-populated slideshows

Speaking of pictures...

We now have two slideshow templates. You may be familiar with {{Random slideshow}}, in which the editor types in (or copies/pastes) a list of pictures he or she wants it to display.

Well, now we have another template, courtesy of Evad37, which accepts one or more page names instead, and displays a random image off of the listed pages. So instead of listing dozens of files by hand, you can include a title or three to be scanned automatically. It even lets you specify particular sections.

The new slideshow template is {{Transclude files as random slideshow}}.

Here's a sample, that grabs images from a single page:

Selected motorcycle or motorcycling pictures

• 
  Brough Superior SS 100 1925 (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  FIM Motocross World Championship, taking place at Mallory Park, England (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  BMW's first motorcycle, the 1923-1925 R32 (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Logo of the British Motorcyclists Federation (BMF) (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Ernesto 'Che' Guevara (left) holding the handlebars of his 500 cc single cylinder Norton motorcycle (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Honda CB750 inline four, the first to be called a 'superbike', and the archetypal Universal Japanese Motorcycle (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Lucius Copeland 1894 (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  A 1969 Harley-Davidson chopper, a replica of the 'Captain America' bike from Easy Rider (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Joey Dunlop on his Honda RC30 ready for the Senior TT (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  2015 BMW R1200RT Sport Touring Motorcycle (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  A 1954 Triumph T110 (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)
• 
  Honda Super Cub, the archetypal underbone and the world's best-selling motor vehicle (from Outline of motorcycles and motorcycling)

New Template:Box-header colour

Speaking of new templates, here's another one!

Also from Evad37, we have a new component for starting section boxes, that is color configurable, and that bypasses the need for box-header subpages altogether. It is {{Box-header colour}}.

For color support, see Web colors.

For the discussion in which this was inspired, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Tasks#Colour combinations for accessibility.

(In case you didn't notice, the slideshow box above uses this new template).

BTW, don't forget to close your box with {{Box-footer}}.

Where are we on the redesign?

The answer to this question is quite involved, and would fill this page to overflowing. Therefore, this subject, including a complete update on where we are at and where we are going with portal design, is covered at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Where are we on portal conversion?

An AWB pass to convert intros on the portals has been completed. The pass couldn't convert them all (due to various formatting configurations, etc.).

All but about 170 portals now have introductions selectively transcluded on the base page. Not counting manually maintained portals, that leaves about 70 portals that either need their intros converted, or they need an intro.

Next, we'll be converting the categories sections!

What's the plan, man?

The course of action we have been taking goes something like this, with all steps being pursued simultaeneously...

1) Design a one-page automated portal model

2) Convert existing portals to that design (except those being manually maintained)

3) Remove subpages no longer needed

4) Develop further tools to empower editors working on portals

Later, when the tools are up to the task, filling in the gaps in coverage (with new portals) will also become practical.

Are we caught up yet?

Probably not.

Who knows what our programmers and editors have dreamed up while I was writing this.

See ya again soon,    — The Transhumanist   11:06, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

thanks for all that

real life keeps interrupting a smooth work flow on that lot - thanks JarrahTree 03:11, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

XFDCloser Hangs when closing pages that had been already deleted

Moved to WT:XFDC § Hangs when closing pages that had been already deleted

 – Evad37 [talk] 09:51, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #014, 27 July 2018

Development of design continues, full speed ahead...

Excerpt slideshows are here!

Can you say "paradigm shift"?

Now, in addition to picture slideshows, we have slideshows that can display excerpts. Portals are not just for topic tasting anymore. Now they can be made useful for surveying Wikipedia's coverage of entire subjects. This gives a deeper meaning to their name. Hmmm. "Portals"... Doorways to knowledge.

Portal:Lithuania was redesigned using excerpt slideshows. Check it out.

For those of you who cannot wait to test out these new toys...

We have not one, but three excerpt slideshow components to pick from:

{{Transclude excerpts as random slideshow}}

For this one, you specify the page names where the excerpts are to be extracted from.

{{Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow}}

This one accepts source pages from where the page names are gathered from list items. Then an excerpt from one of those pages is displayed. The selection of what is included in the slide show can be limited to a specific number from the collection (of the page names gathered), and that selection is renewed from scratch each time the page is purged.

For example, if you specify Template:World Heritage Sites in Spain as a source page, the slideshow will cycle through those sites. Now you don't have to type them in one-by-one. This greatly reduces portal creation time.

{{Transclude linked excerpts as random slideshow}}

Same as above, but gathers links instead of just linked list items.

Panoramic banners

{{Portal image banner}} displays a panoramic picture the width of the page, and adjusts its size, so it stays that way even if the user changes page view size. And it accepts multiple file names, so that the picture displayed randomizes between them each time the page is visited/purged.

Give resizing the page a try:

Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

You can now balance section boxes

Before:

Reptile types

• 
  
  

  

  Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus)

  
  Crocodiles (family Crocodylidae) or true crocodiles are large semiaquatic reptiles that live throughout the tropics in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia. The term crocodile is sometimes used even more loosely to include all extant members of the order Crocodilia, which includes the alligators and caimans (family Alligatoridae), the gharial and false gharial (family Gavialidae) among other extinct taxa. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Northern tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus punctatus)

  
  The tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) is a species of reptile endemic to New Zealand. Despite its close resemblance to lizards, it is part of a distinct lineage, the order Rhynchocephalia. The name tuatara is derived from the Māori language and means "peaks on the back". (Full article...)
• 

  

  
  Snakes are elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes (/sɜːrˈpɛntiːz/). Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads (cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have independently evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs at least twenty-five times via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Dibamidae, and Pygopodidae). (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Blanus cinereus, Spain

  
  Amphisbaenia /æmfɪsˈbiːniə/ (called amphisbaenians or worm lizards) is a group of typically legless lizards, comprising over 200 extant species. Amphisbaenians are characterized by their long bodies, the reduction or loss of the limbs, and rudimentary eyes. As many species have a pink body and scales arranged in rings, they have a superficial resemblance to earthworms. While the genus Bipes retains forelimbs, all other genera are limbless. Phylogenetic studies suggest that they are nested within Lacertoidea, closely related to the lizard family Lacertidae. Amphisbaenians are widely distributed, occurring in North America, Europe, Africa, South America, Western Asia and the Caribbean. Most species are less than 6 inches (15 cm) long. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  An American alligator (top) and a Chinese alligator

  
  An alligator, or colloquially gator, is a large reptile in the genus Alligator of the family Alligatoridae of the order Crocodilia. The two extant species are the American alligator (A. mississippiensis) and the Chinese alligator (A. sinensis). Additionally, several extinct species of alligator are known from fossil remains. Alligators first appeared during the late Eocene epoch about 37 million years ago. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Turtles from different families; clockwise from top-left: Red-bellied short-necked turtle, Indian flapshell turtle, Hawksbill sea turtle, and Galápagos tortoise

  
  Turtles, or testudines, are reptiles of the order Testudines, characterized by a special shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked turtles), which differ in the way the head retracts. There are 360 living and recently extinct species of turtles, including land-dwelling tortoises and freshwater terrapins. They are found on most continents, some islands and, in the case of sea turtles, much of the ocean. Like other amniotes (reptiles, birds, and mammals) they breathe air and do not lay eggs underwater, although many species live in or around water. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Aldabra giant tortoise
  (Aldabrachelys gigantea)

  
  Tortoises (/ˈtɔːr.təs.ɪz/) are reptiles of the family Testudinidae of the order Testudines (Latin for "tortoise"). Like other turtles, tortoises have a shell to protect from predation and other threats. The shell in tortoises is generally hard, and like other members of the suborder Cryptodira, they retract their necks and heads directly backward into the shell to protect them. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Clockwise from top left: veiled chameleon (Chamaeleo calyptratus), rock monitor (Varanus albigularis), common blue-tongued skink (Tiliqua scincoides), Italian wall lizard (Podarcis sicula), giant leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus fimbriatus), and legless lizard (Anelytropsis papillosus)

  
  Lizard is the common name used for all squamate reptiles other than snakes (and to a lesser extent amphisbaenians), encompassing over 7,000 species, ranging across all continents except Antarctica, as well as most oceanic island chains. The grouping is paraphyletic as some lizards are more closely related to snakes than they are to other lizards. Lizards range in size from chameleons and geckos a few centimeters long to the 3-meter-long Komodo dragon. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Yacare caiman, Caiman yacare

  
  A caiman (/ˈkeɪmən/; also cayman as a variant spelling from Taíno kaiman) is an alligatorid belonging to the subfamily Caimaninae, one of two primary lineages within the Alligatoridae family, the other being alligators. Caimans inhabit Mexico and Central and South America from marshes and swamps to mangrove rivers and lakes. They have scaly skin and live a fairly nocturnal existence. They are relatively small-sized crocodilians with an average maximum weight of 6 to 40 kg (13 to 88 lb) depending on species, with the exception of the black caiman (Melanosuchus niger), which can grow more than 4 m (13 ft) in length and weigh in excess of 1,000 kg (2,200 Ib). The black caiman is the largest caiman species in the world and is found in the slow-moving rivers and lakes that surround the Amazon basin. The smallest species is the Cuvier's dwarf caiman (Paleosuchus palpebrosus), which grows to 1.2 to 1.5 m (3.9 to 4.9 ft) long. There are six different species of caiman found throughout the watery jungle habitats of Central and Southern America. The average length for most of the other caiman species is about 2 to 2.5 m (6.6 to 8.2 ft) long. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Male gharial

  
  The gharial (Gavialis gangeticus), also known as gavial or fish-eating crocodile, is a crocodilian in the family Gavialidae and among the longest of all living crocodilians. Mature females are 2.6 to 4.5 m (8 ft 6 in to 14 ft 9 in) long, and males 3 to 6 m (9 ft 10 in to 19 ft 8 in). Adult males have a distinct boss at the end of the snout, which resembles an earthenware pot known as a ghara, hence the name "gharial". The gharial is well adapted to catching fish because of its long, narrow snout and 110 sharp, interlocking teeth. (Full article...)

Amphibian types

• 
  
  

  

  Oscaecilia ochrocephala (Caeciliidae)

  
  Caecilians (/sɪˈsɪliən/; New Latin for 'blind ones') are a group of limbless, vermiform (worm-shaped) or serpentine (snake-shaped) amphibians with small or sometimes nonexistent eyes. They mostly live hidden in soil or in streambeds, and this cryptic lifestyle renders caecilians among the least familiar amphibians. Modern caecilians live in the tropics of South and Central America, Africa, and southern Asia. Caecilians feed on small subterranean creatures such as earthworms. The body is cylindrical and often darkly coloured, and the skull is bullet-shaped and strongly built. Caecilian heads have several unique adaptations, including fused cranial and jaw bones, a two-part system of jaw muscles, and a chemosensory tentacle in front of the eye. The skin is slimy and bears ringlike markings or grooves and may contain scales.
  
  Modern caecilians are a clade, the order Gymnophiona /ˌdʒɪmnəˈfaɪənə/ (or Apoda /ˈæpədə/), one of the three living amphibian groups alongside Anura (frogs) and Urodela (salamanders). Gymnophiona is a crown group, encompassing all modern caecilians and all descendants of their last common ancestor. There are more than 220 living species of caecilian classified in 10 families. Gymnophionomorpha is a recently coined name for the corresponding total group which includes Gymnophiona as well as a few extinct stem-group caecilians (extinct amphibians whose closest living relatives are caecilians but are not descended from any caecilian). Some palaeontologists have used the name Gymnophiona for the total group and the old name Apoda for the crown group'. However, Apoda has other even older uses, including as the name of a genus of Butterfly making its use potentially confusing and best avoided. 'Gymnophiona' derives from the Greek words γυμνος / gymnos (Ancient Greek for 'naked') and οφις / ophis (Ancient Greek for 'snake'), as the caecilians were originally thought to be related to snakes and to lack scales.
  
  The study of caecilian evolution is complicated by their poor fossil record and specialized anatomy. Genetic evidence and some anatomical details (such as pedicellate teeth) support the idea that frogs, salamanders, and caecilians (collectively known as lissamphibians) are each others' closest relatives. Frogs and salamanders show many similarities to dissorophoids, a group of extinct amphibians in the order Temnospondyli. Caecilians are more controversial; many studies extend dissorophoid ancestry to caecilians. Some studies have instead argued that caecilians descend from extinct lepospondyl or stereospondyl amphibians, contradicting evidence for lissamphibian monophyly (common ancestry). Rare fossils of early gymnophionans such as Eocaecilia and Funcusvermis have helped to test the various conflicting hypotheses for the relationships between caecilians and other living and extinct amphibians. ('Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Spotted salamander, Ambystoma maculatum

  
  Salamanders are a group of amphibians typically characterized by their lizard-like appearance, with slender bodies, blunt snouts, short limbs projecting at right angles to the body, and the presence of a tail in both larvae and adults. All ten extant salamander families are grouped together under the order Urodela from the group Caudata. Salamander diversity is highest in eastern North America, especially in the Appalachian Mountains; most species are found in the Holarctic realm, with some species present in the Neotropical realm.
  
  Salamanders never have more than four toes on their front legs and five on their rear legs, but some species have fewer digits and others lack hind limbs. Their permeable skin usually makes them reliant on habitats in or near water or other cool, damp places. Some salamander species are fully aquatic throughout their lives, some take to the water intermittently, and others are entirely terrestrial as adults.
  
  This group of amphibians is capable of regenerating lost limbs as well as other damaged parts of their bodies. Researchers hope to reverse engineer the regenerative processes for potential human medical applications, such as brain and spinal cord injury treatment or preventing harmful scarring during heart surgery recovery. The remarkable ability of salamanders to regenerate is not just limited to limbs but extends to vital organs such as the heart, jaw, and parts of the spinal cord, showing their uniqueness compared to different types of vertebrates. ⁤⁤This ability is most remarkable for occurring without any type of scarring. ⁤⁤This has made salamanders an invaluable model organism in scientific research aimed at understanding and achieving regenerative processes for medical advancements in human and animal biology. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Various types of frog

  
  A frog is any member of a diverse and largely carnivorous group of short-bodied, tailless amphibians composing the order Anura (ἀνούρα, literally without tail in Ancient Greek). The oldest fossil "proto-frog" Triadobatrachus is known from the Early Triassic of Madagascar, but molecular clock dating suggests their split from other amphibians may extend further back to the Permian, 265 million years ago. Frogs are widely distributed, ranging from the tropics to subarctic regions, but the greatest concentration of species diversity is in tropical rainforest. Frogs account for around 88% of extant amphibian species. They are also one of the five most diverse vertebrate orders. Warty frog species tend to be called toads, but the distinction between frogs and toads is informal, not from taxonomy or evolutionary history.
  
  An adult frog has a stout body, protruding eyes, anteriorly-attached tongue, limbs folded underneath, and no tail (the tail of tailed frogs is an extension of the male cloaca). Frogs have glandular skin, with secretions ranging from distasteful to toxic. Their skin varies in colour from well-camouflaged dappled brown, grey and green to vivid patterns of bright red or yellow and black to show toxicity and ward off predators. Adult frogs live in fresh water and on dry land; some species are adapted for living underground or in trees.
  
  Frogs typically lay their eggs in water. The eggs hatch into aquatic larvae called tadpoles that have tails and internal gills. They have highly specialized rasping mouth parts suitable for herbivorous, omnivorous or planktivorous diets. The life cycle is completed when they metamorphose into adults. A few species deposit eggs on land or bypass the tadpole stage. Adult frogs generally have a carnivorous diet consisting of small invertebrates, but omnivorous species exist and a few feed on plant matter. Frog skin has a rich microbiome which is important to their health. Frogs are extremely efficient at converting what they eat into body mass. They are an important food source for predators and part of the food web dynamics of many of the world's ecosystems. The skin is semi-permeable, making them susceptible to dehydration, so they either live in moist places or have special adaptations to deal with dry habitats. Frogs produce a wide range of vocalizations, particularly in their breeding season, and exhibit many different kinds of complex behaviors to attract mates, to fend off predators and to generally survive. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  European fire-bellied toad (Bombina bombina), a member of the family Bombinatoridae

  
  Toad is a common name for certain frogs, especially of the family Bufonidae, that are characterized by dry, leathery skin, short legs, and large bumps covering the parotoid glands.
  
  A distinction between frogs and toads is not made in scientific taxonomy, but is common in popular culture (folk taxonomy), in which toads are associated with drier, rougher skin and more terrestrial habitats. (Full article...)

After:

Reptile types

• 
  
  

  

  Turtles from different families; clockwise from top-left: Red-bellied short-necked turtle, Indian flapshell turtle, Hawksbill sea turtle, and Galápagos tortoise

  
  Turtles, or testudines, are reptiles of the order Testudines, characterized by a special shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked turtles), which differ in the way the head retracts. There are 360 living and recently extinct species of turtles, including land-dwelling tortoises and freshwater terrapins. They are found on most continents, some islands and, in the case of sea turtles, much of the ocean. Like other amniotes (reptiles, birds, and mammals) they breathe air and do not lay eggs underwater, although many species live in or around water. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus)

  
  Crocodiles (family Crocodylidae) or true crocodiles are large semiaquatic reptiles that live throughout the tropics in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia. The term crocodile is sometimes used even more loosely to include all extant members of the order Crocodilia, which includes the alligators and caimans (family Alligatoridae), the gharial and false gharial (family Gavialidae) among other extinct taxa. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  An American alligator (top) and a Chinese alligator

  
  An alligator, or colloquially gator, is a large reptile in the genus Alligator of the family Alligatoridae of the order Crocodilia. The two extant species are the American alligator (A. mississippiensis) and the Chinese alligator (A. sinensis). Additionally, several extinct species of alligator are known from fossil remains. Alligators first appeared during the late Eocene epoch about 37 million years ago. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Aldabra giant tortoise
  (Aldabrachelys gigantea)

  
  Tortoises (/ˈtɔːr.təs.ɪz/) are reptiles of the family Testudinidae of the order Testudines (Latin for "tortoise"). Like other turtles, tortoises have a shell to protect from predation and other threats. The shell in tortoises is generally hard, and like other members of the suborder Cryptodira, they retract their necks and heads directly backward into the shell to protect them. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Male gharial

  
  The gharial (Gavialis gangeticus), also known as gavial or fish-eating crocodile, is a crocodilian in the family Gavialidae and among the longest of all living crocodilians. Mature females are 2.6 to 4.5 m (8 ft 6 in to 14 ft 9 in) long, and males 3 to 6 m (9 ft 10 in to 19 ft 8 in). Adult males have a distinct boss at the end of the snout, which resembles an earthenware pot known as a ghara, hence the name "gharial". The gharial is well adapted to catching fish because of its long, narrow snout and 110 sharp, interlocking teeth. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Blanus cinereus, Spain

  
  Amphisbaenia /æmfɪsˈbiːniə/ (called amphisbaenians or worm lizards) is a group of typically legless lizards, comprising over 200 extant species. Amphisbaenians are characterized by their long bodies, the reduction or loss of the limbs, and rudimentary eyes. As many species have a pink body and scales arranged in rings, they have a superficial resemblance to earthworms. While the genus Bipes retains forelimbs, all other genera are limbless. Phylogenetic studies suggest that they are nested within Lacertoidea, closely related to the lizard family Lacertidae. Amphisbaenians are widely distributed, occurring in North America, Europe, Africa, South America, Western Asia and the Caribbean. Most species are less than 6 inches (15 cm) long. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Clockwise from top left: veiled chameleon (Chamaeleo calyptratus), rock monitor (Varanus albigularis), common blue-tongued skink (Tiliqua scincoides), Italian wall lizard (Podarcis sicula), giant leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus fimbriatus), and legless lizard (Anelytropsis papillosus)

  
  Lizard is the common name used for all squamate reptiles other than snakes (and to a lesser extent amphisbaenians), encompassing over 7,000 species, ranging across all continents except Antarctica, as well as most oceanic island chains. The grouping is paraphyletic as some lizards are more closely related to snakes than they are to other lizards. Lizards range in size from chameleons and geckos a few centimeters long to the 3-meter-long Komodo dragon. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Northern tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus punctatus)

  
  The tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) is a species of reptile endemic to New Zealand. Despite its close resemblance to lizards, it is part of a distinct lineage, the order Rhynchocephalia. The name tuatara is derived from the Māori language and means "peaks on the back". (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Yacare caiman, Caiman yacare

  
  A caiman (/ˈkeɪmən/; also cayman as a variant spelling from Taíno kaiman) is an alligatorid belonging to the subfamily Caimaninae, one of two primary lineages within the Alligatoridae family, the other being alligators. Caimans inhabit Mexico and Central and South America from marshes and swamps to mangrove rivers and lakes. They have scaly skin and live a fairly nocturnal existence. They are relatively small-sized crocodilians with an average maximum weight of 6 to 40 kg (13 to 88 lb) depending on species, with the exception of the black caiman (Melanosuchus niger), which can grow more than 4 m (13 ft) in length and weigh in excess of 1,000 kg (2,200 Ib). The black caiman is the largest caiman species in the world and is found in the slow-moving rivers and lakes that surround the Amazon basin. The smallest species is the Cuvier's dwarf caiman (Paleosuchus palpebrosus), which grows to 1.2 to 1.5 m (3.9 to 4.9 ft) long. There are six different species of caiman found throughout the watery jungle habitats of Central and Southern America. The average length for most of the other caiman species is about 2 to 2.5 m (6.6 to 8.2 ft) long. (Full article...)
• 

  

  
  Snakes are elongated, limbless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes (/sɜːrˈpɛntiːz/). Like all other squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales. Many species of snakes have skulls with several more joints than their lizard ancestors, enabling them to swallow prey much larger than their heads (cranial kinesis). To accommodate their narrow bodies, snakes' paired organs (such as kidneys) appear one in front of the other instead of side by side, and most have only one functional lung. Some species retain a pelvic girdle with a pair of vestigial claws on either side of the cloaca. Lizards have independently evolved elongate bodies without limbs or with greatly reduced limbs at least twenty-five times via convergent evolution, leading to many lineages of legless lizards. These resemble snakes, but several common groups of legless lizards have eyelids and external ears, which snakes lack, although this rule is not universal (see Amphisbaenia, Dibamidae, and Pygopodidae). (Full article...)

Amphibian types

• 
  
  

  

  Spotted salamander, Ambystoma maculatum

  
  Salamanders are a group of amphibians typically characterized by their lizard-like appearance, with slender bodies, blunt snouts, short limbs projecting at right angles to the body, and the presence of a tail in both larvae and adults. All ten extant salamander families are grouped together under the order Urodela from the group Caudata. Salamander diversity is highest in eastern North America, especially in the Appalachian Mountains; most species are found in the Holarctic realm, with some species present in the Neotropical realm.
  
  Salamanders never have more than four toes on their front legs and five on their rear legs, but some species have fewer digits and others lack hind limbs. Their permeable skin usually makes them reliant on habitats in or near water or other cool, damp places. Some salamander species are fully aquatic throughout their lives, some take to the water intermittently, and others are entirely terrestrial as adults.
  
  This group of amphibians is capable of regenerating lost limbs as well as other damaged parts of their bodies. Researchers hope to reverse engineer the regenerative processes for potential human medical applications, such as brain and spinal cord injury treatment or preventing harmful scarring during heart surgery recovery. The remarkable ability of salamanders to regenerate is not just limited to limbs but extends to vital organs such as the heart, jaw, and parts of the spinal cord, showing their uniqueness compared to different types of vertebrates. ⁤⁤This ability is most remarkable for occurring without any type of scarring. ⁤⁤This has made salamanders an invaluable model organism in scientific research aimed at understanding and achieving regenerative processes for medical advancements in human and animal biology. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  European fire-bellied toad (Bombina bombina), a member of the family Bombinatoridae

  
  Toad is a common name for certain frogs, especially of the family Bufonidae, that are characterized by dry, leathery skin, short legs, and large bumps covering the parotoid glands.
  
  A distinction between frogs and toads is not made in scientific taxonomy, but is common in popular culture (folk taxonomy), in which toads are associated with drier, rougher skin and more terrestrial habitats. (Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Oscaecilia ochrocephala (Caeciliidae)

  
  Caecilians (/sɪˈsɪliən/; New Latin for 'blind ones') are a group of limbless, vermiform (worm-shaped) or serpentine (snake-shaped) amphibians with small or sometimes nonexistent eyes. They mostly live hidden in soil or in streambeds, and this cryptic lifestyle renders caecilians among the least familiar amphibians. Modern caecilians live in the tropics of South and Central America, Africa, and southern Asia. Caecilians feed on small subterranean creatures such as earthworms. The body is cylindrical and often darkly coloured, and the skull is bullet-shaped and strongly built. Caecilian heads have several unique adaptations, including fused cranial and jaw bones, a two-part system of jaw muscles, and a chemosensory tentacle in front of the eye. The skin is slimy and bears ringlike markings or grooves and may contain scales.
  
  Modern caecilians are a clade, the order Gymnophiona /ˌdʒɪmnəˈfaɪənə/ (or Apoda /ˈæpədə/), one of the three living amphibian groups alongside Anura (frogs) and Urodela (salamanders). Gymnophiona is a crown group, encompassing all modern caecilians and all descendants of their last common ancestor. There are more than 220 living species of caecilian classified in 10 families. Gymnophionomorpha is a recently coined name for the corresponding total group which includes Gymnophiona as well as a few extinct stem-group caecilians (extinct amphibians whose closest living relatives are caecilians but are not descended from any caecilian). Some palaeontologists have used the name Gymnophiona for the total group and the old name Apoda for the crown group'. However, Apoda has other even older uses, including as the name of a genus of Butterfly making its use potentially confusing and best avoided. 'Gymnophiona' derives from the Greek words γυμνος / gymnos (Ancient Greek for 'naked') and οφις / ophis (Ancient Greek for 'snake'), as the caecilians were originally thought to be related to snakes and to lack scales.
  
  The study of caecilian evolution is complicated by their poor fossil record and specialized anatomy. Genetic evidence and some anatomical details (such as pedicellate teeth) support the idea that frogs, salamanders, and caecilians (collectively known as lissamphibians) are each others' closest relatives. Frogs and salamanders show many similarities to dissorophoids, a group of extinct amphibians in the order Temnospondyli. Caecilians are more controversial; many studies extend dissorophoid ancestry to caecilians. Some studies have instead argued that caecilians descend from extinct lepospondyl or stereospondyl amphibians, contradicting evidence for lissamphibian monophyly (common ancestry). Rare fossils of early gymnophionans such as Eocaecilia and Funcusvermis have helped to test the various conflicting hypotheses for the relationships between caecilians and other living and extinct amphibians. ('Full article...)
• 
  
  

  

  Various types of frog

  
  A frog is any member of a diverse and largely carnivorous group of short-bodied, tailless amphibians composing the order Anura (ἀνούρα, literally without tail in Ancient Greek). The oldest fossil "proto-frog" Triadobatrachus is known from the Early Triassic of Madagascar, but molecular clock dating suggests their split from other amphibians may extend further back to the Permian, 265 million years ago. Frogs are widely distributed, ranging from the tropics to subarctic regions, but the greatest concentration of species diversity is in tropical rainforest. Frogs account for around 88% of extant amphibian species. They are also one of the five most diverse vertebrate orders. Warty frog species tend to be called toads, but the distinction between frogs and toads is informal, not from taxonomy or evolutionary history.
  
  An adult frog has a stout body, protruding eyes, anteriorly-attached tongue, limbs folded underneath, and no tail (the tail of tailed frogs is an extension of the male cloaca). Frogs have glandular skin, with secretions ranging from distasteful to toxic. Their skin varies in colour from well-camouflaged dappled brown, grey and green to vivid patterns of bright red or yellow and black to show toxicity and ward off predators. Adult frogs live in fresh water and on dry land; some species are adapted for living underground or in trees.
  
  Frogs typically lay their eggs in water. The eggs hatch into aquatic larvae called tadpoles that have tails and internal gills. They have highly specialized rasping mouth parts suitable for herbivorous, omnivorous or planktivorous diets. The life cycle is completed when they metamorphose into adults. A few species deposit eggs on land or bypass the tadpole stage. Adult frogs generally have a carnivorous diet consisting of small invertebrates, but omnivorous species exist and a few feed on plant matter. Frog skin has a rich microbiome which is important to their health. Frogs are extremely efficient at converting what they eat into body mass. They are an important food source for predators and part of the food web dynamics of many of the world's ecosystems. The skin is semi-permeable, making them susceptible to dehydration, so they either live in moist places or have special adaptations to deal with dry habitats. Frogs produce a wide range of vocalizations, particularly in their breeding season, and exhibit many different kinds of complex behaviors to attract mates, to fend off predators and to generally survive. (Full article...)

Notice how the box bottoms line up. That readjusts even if you click the slideshow buttons.

The template used for this is {{Flex columns}}.

By the way, when you include more than one box in a column, any left over whitespace in that column is divided between them.

Box-header colour

You may have noticed the new {{Box-header colour}} template used above. It lets you pick the color locally (right on the same page). Before, this was handled on a subpage somewhere.

Testing, testing

Now that we have lots of toys to play with for making cool portals...

Don't forget, that the majority of views of Wikipedia these days are from mobile devices. We need to make certain that portals display well on those. So, remember to check your work on portals in mobile view mode...

To see a portal in mobile view mode, insert a ".m" into a portal's url, after "en", like this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Reptile

If you discover problems in a portal you can't fix, report them on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design.

Until next time...

Have fun.    — The Transhumanist   00:58, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

What percentage of WP viewing is from mobile devices?

Someone asked me for a reference on this.

You wouldn't happen to know the link to this statistic, would you?

Thank you,    — The Transhumanist   00:39, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: Sitewide, for the latest 20 days, there were approx 5,000,000,000 user views totals, including approx 2,200,000,000 on desktop, 86,000,000 on mobile apps and 2,700,000,000 on mobile web. So roughly 44% desktop, 54% mobile web, and 2% mobile apps. However, that's probably heavily biased towards mainspace, and certain pages in mainspace. For individual pages there's huge variation, e.g for Portal:Lithuania there's 552 total, of which 502 are on desktop (91%). There's a link to pageview stats at the top of history pages. - Evad37 [talk] 01:17, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Thank you. By sitewide, you are referring to the English Wikpedia, and not all the language versions, right?    — The Transhumanist   01:30, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Yes, just English Wikpedia - Evad37 [talk] 01:37, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.12 30 July 2018

Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months. ()

Hello Evad37, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

June backlog drive

Overall the June backlog drive was a success, reducing the last 3,000 or so to below 500. However, as expected, 90% of the patrolling was done by less than 10% of reviewers.
Since the drive closed, the backlog has begun to rise sharply again and is back up to nearly 1,400 already. Please help reduce this total and keep it from raising further by reviewing some articles each day.

New technology, new rules

• New features are shortly going to be added to the Special:NewPagesFeed which include a list of drafts for review, OTRS flags for COPYVIO, and more granular filter preferences. More details can be found at this page.
• Probationary permissions: Now that PERM has been configured to allow expiry dates to all minor user rights, new NPR flag holders may sometimes be limited in the first instance to 6 months during which their work will be assessed for both quality and quantity of their reviews. This will allow admins to accord the right in borderline cases rather than make a flat out rejection.
• Current reviewers who have had the flag for longer than 6 months but have not used the permissions since they were granted will have the flag removed, but may still request to have it granted again in the future, subject to the same probationary period, if they wish to become an active reviewer.

Editathons

• Editathons will continue through August. Please be gentle with new pages that obviously come from good faith participants, especially articles from developing economies and ones about female subjects. Consider using the 'move to draft' tool rather than bluntly tagging articles that may have potential but which cannot yet reside in mainspace.

The Signpost

• The next issue of the monthly magazine will be out soon. The newspaper is an excellent way to stay up to date with news and new developments between our newsletters. If you have special messages to be published, or if you would like to submit an article (one about NPR perhaps?), don't hesitate to contact the editorial team here.

---

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)} 00:00, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Uses TemplateStyles/sandbox/example.css

Template:Uses TemplateStyles/sandbox/example.css has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 00:13, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #015, 31 July 2018

Now that we have lots of toys to play with, it's play time!

Here are some fun activities to use our new toys on...

Fun activity #1: put the improved panorama template to use

Would you like to travel around the world? Well, this may be the next best thing...

Here's another fun toy to play with: {{Portal image banner}}

To see what it looks like, check out the panoramas at the tops of the following portals:

• Portal:India
• Portal:Melbourne
• Portal:Perth
• Portal:Monaco
• Portal:South Sudan
• Portal:Thiruvananthapuram
• Portal:Lithuania
• Portal:Brisbane
• Portal:Abu Dhabi
• Portal:Athens
• Portal:Barcelona
• Portal:Calgary
• Portal:Dhaka
• Portal:Dresden
• Portal:Edinburgh
• Portal:Florence
• Portal:Houston
• Portal:Miami
• Portal:Milan
• Portal:Moscow
• Portal:Munich
• Portal:Seattle
• Portal:Stockholm
• Portal:Turin
• Portal:Bermuda

The task: There are many geography portals that lack panoramas. Please add some. Please keep the file size down below 2 megabytes, and keep in mind that you may find quality banners at commons: at less than 200K (.2 megabytes). Good search terms to include with the place name are "banner", "cityscape", "skyline", "panorama", "landscape", etc.

Related task: There are also lots of geography portals that have panoramas used as gaudy banners (with print or icons splattered across them) or that display them in some random location on the page. In many cases, those pages would be improved by displaying the panorama as a clean picture at the top of the intro section, like on the examples above. This works best with banner-like panoramas. Please fix such pages when you come across them, if you believe it would improve the look of the page.

Taller images might be better suited displayed further down the page, or in the "Selected images" section.

Note that {{Portal image banner}} supports multiple images, and displays one at random upon the first visit, and each time the page is purged.

Fun activity #2: install "Selected images" sections

That is, image slideshows!

Over 200 have been installed so far. Just 1200 to go. (Be sure not to install them on portals with active maintainers, unless they want you to).

The title "Selected images" reflects the fact that not all images on Wikipedia are pictures, and encompasses maps, graphs, diagrams, sketches, paintings, pictures, and so on.

The toys we have to work with for this are:

{{Random slideshow}}

and

{{Transclude files as random slideshow}}

The task: Using one of the above templates directly on a portal's base page, replace static "Selected picture" sections, with a section like one of these:

Selected images

• 
  Koi are ornamental domesticated varieties of the common carp Cyprinus carpio, originated from China and widely spread in Japan. They are very closely related to goldfish. The word "koi" comes from Japanese meaning "carp".
• 
  A discus (Symphysodon discus) is guarding its eggs. As for most cichlids, brood care is highly developed with both the parents caring for the young. Additionally, adult discus produce a secretion through their skin, off which the larvae live during their first few days.
• 
  Salmon fry hatching (Salmo salar) - the larva has grown around the remains of the yolk - visible are the arteries spinning around the yolk and little oildrops, also the gut, the spine, the main caudal blood vessel, the bladder and the arcs of the gills.
• 
  The red lionfish (Pterois volitans) is a venomous coral reef fish from the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. The red lionfish is also found off the east coast of the United States, and was likely first introduced off the Florida coast in the early to mid 1990s.

Selected images

• 
  A dirt road acted as a fire barrier in South Africa. The effects of the barrier can clearly be seen on the unburnt (left) and burnt (right) sides of the road. (from Wildfire)
• 
  Global fires during the year 2008 for the months of August (top image) and February (bottom image), as detected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite. (from Wildfire)
• 
  National map of groundwater and soil moisture in the United States. It shows the very low soil moisture associated with the 2011 fire season in Texas. (from Wildfire)
• 
  First growth or virgin forest near Mount Rainier, 1914 (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Virgin forest about 2500 m above sea level in Shennongjia Forestry District, Hubei, China (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Smoke from the 2020 California wildfires settles over San Francisco (from Wildfire)
• 
  Forest fires visible from a distance in Dajti National Park, Tirana, Albania (from Wildfire)
• 
  Elk Bath, an award-winning photograph of elk avoiding a wildfire in Montana (from Wildfire)
• 
  A Russian firefighter extinguishing a wildfire (from Wildfire)
• 
  Cupressaceae: scale leaves of Lawson's cypress (Chamaecyparis lawsoniana); scale in mm (from Conifer)
• 
  Wildfire smoke in atmosphere off the U.S. West Coast in 2020 (from Wildfire)
• 
  Wildfire burning in the Kaibab National Forest, Arizona, United States, in 2020. The Mangum Fire burned more than 70,000 acres (280 km²) of forest. (from Wildfire)
• 
  2003 Canberra bushfires, visible from Parliament House (from Wildfire)
• 
  Downed wood replenishes topsoil as it decays. (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Fungus Climacocystis borealis on a tree stump in the Białowieża Forest, one of the last largely intact primeval forests in Central Europe (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Dry Mountain Fire Lookout in the Ochoco National Forest, Oregon, US circa 1930 (from Wildfire)
• 
  Charred shrubland in suburban Sydney (2019–20 Australian bushfires). (from Wildfire)
• 
  The northern spotted owl primarily inhabits old-growth forests in the northern part of its range (Canada to southern Oregon) and landscapes with a mix of old and younger forest types in the southern part of its range (the Klamath region and California). (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Aerial view of deliberate wildfires on the Khun Tan Range, Thailand. These fires are lit by local farmers every year to promote the growth of a certain mushroom. (from Wildfire)
• 
  Old-growth European beech forest in Biogradska Gora National Park, Montenegro (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Globosa, a cultivar of Pinus sylvestris, a northern European species, in the North American Red Butte Garden (from Conifer)
• 
  A Monterey pine forest in Sydney, Australia (from Conifer)
• 
  Phylogeny of the Pinophyta based on cladistic analysis of molecular data. (from Conifer)
• 
  Wildfire near Yosemite National Park, United States, in 2013. The Rim Fire burned more than 250,000 acres (1,000 km²) of forest. (from Wildfire)
• 
  A prescribed burn in a Pinus nigra stand in Portugal (from Wildfire)
• 
  In Abies grandis (grand fir), and many other species with spirally arranged leaves, leaf bases are twisted to flatten their arrangement and maximize light capture. (from Conifer)
• 
  Tāne Mahuta, the biggest kauri (Agathis australis) tree alive, in the Waipoua Forest of the Northland Region of New Zealand. (from Conifer)
• 
  Ecological succession after a wildfire in a boreal pine forest next to Hara Bog, Lahemaa National Park, Estonia. The pictures were taken one and two years after the fire. (from Wildfire)
• 
  Redwood tree in northern California redwood forest: According to the National Park Service, "96 percent of the original old-growth coast redwoods have been logged." (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Wildland firefighter working a brush fire in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, US (from Wildfire)
• 
  Pinaceae: needle-like leaves and vegetative buds of Coast Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. menziesii) (from Conifer)
• 
  Lightning-sparked wildfires are frequent occurrences during the dry summer season in Nevada. (from Wildfire)
• 
  Cool temperate rainforest in Tasmania, Australia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Sediment off the Yucatán Peninsula (from Wildfire)
• 
  Antarctic beech old-growth in Lamington National Park, Queensland, Australia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  A surface fire in the western desert of Utah, United States (from Wildfire)
• 
  Old-growth red cedar stump near Port Renfrew, British Columbia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  Charred landscape following a crown fire in the North Cascades, United States (from Wildfire)
• 
  A coniferous forest pictured in the coat of arms of the Kainuu region in Finland (from Conifer)
• 
  Araucariaceae: awl-like leaves of Cook pine (Araucaria columnaris) (from Conifer)
• 
  Eucalyptus regnans forest in Tasmania, Australia (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  A thin transverse section showing the internal structure of conifer wood (from Conifer)
• 
  A wildfire in Venezuela during a drought (from Wildfire)
• 
  Animation of diaphragmatic breathing with the diaphragm shown in green (from Wildfire)
• 
  Pinaceae: unopened female cones of subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa) (from Conifer)
• 
  Fire Propagation Model (from Wildfire)
• 
  Avatar Grove near Port Renfrew, British Columbia: Giant Douglas firs (left) and red cedars (right) fill the grove. (from Old-growth forest)
• 
  The narrow conical shape of northern conifers, and their downward-drooping limbs, help them shed snow. (from Conifer)
• 
  Old-growth forest in the Opal Creek Wilderness, a wilderness area located in the Willamette National Forest in the U.S. state of Oregon, on the border of Mount Hood National Forest. It has the largest uncut watershed in Oregon. (from Old-growth forest)

The one on the left uses {{Random slideshow}} (which accepts file names), and the one on the right uses {{Transclude files as random slideshow}} (which accepts source pages from which the filenames are gathered).

The above section formatting is used on many of the pages you will come across, but not all. In those cases, use whatever section formatting matches the rest of the page.

Note that you may come across "Selected picture" sections done with {{Random portal component}} templates. That template call is the entire section. Replace it with a section that matches the other sections on the page, and put the new slideshow inside that.

For example, in Portal:California, this code:

{{Random portal component|max=21|seed=27|header=Selected picture|subpage=Selected picture}}

was replaced with this code:

{{/box-header|Selected images|noedit=yes}}
{{Transclude files as random slideshow
| {{PAGENAME}}
| Culture of {{PAGENAME}}
}}
{{Box-footer}}

And the new section blended right in with the formatting of the rest of the page. Note the use of the {{PAGENAME}} magic word. Plain article titles also work. Don't feel limited to one or two page names. But be sure to test each slideshow before installing the next one. (Or if you prefer, in batches - just don't leave them hanging). Report technical problems at the Portal design talk page.

Fun activity #3: upgrade "Selected article" sections

These sections, where unmaintained, have gone stale. That's because 1) the excerpts are static, having been manually copied and pasted, and 2) because they lack automatic addition of new entries.

They can be upgraded with:

{{Transclude random excerpt}}

or

{{Transclude list item excerpt}}

or

{{Transclude linked excerpt}}

All three of these will provide excerpts that won't go stale. The latter two can provide excerpt collections that won't go stale, by providing new entries over time. The key is to select source pages or source sections that are frequently updated, such as root article sections, mainstream lists, or navigation templates.

Where will this put us?

When the above tasks are completed for the entire collection of portals (except the ones with specific maintainers), we'll be more than half-way done with the portal system upgrade.

Keep up the great work.    — The Transhumanist   19:10, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Publishing script error

I wonder why [13] was necessary? ☆ Bri (talk) 02:08, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

@Bri: This edit [14] added {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/RSS description|1=Title}}, and it was still there when it was published. If there's an existing value in the RSS description, the script won't override it. - Evad37 [talk] 02:17, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

That makes sense then. We had to re-do that feature when a new topic was selected. ☆ Bri (talk) 02:41, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	Thank you for all of your contributions to skin-related bugs, including the patches you've submitted! I haven't seen a patch that closed as many bugs as gerrit:442021 in quite a while :) Legoktm (talk) 04:17, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

adding mapframe at {{Infobox shopping mall}} and {{Infobox settlement}}

Hello, may you please add the dynamic wikimap parameter into those two templates, your edits on {{Infobox building}} are very useful and better than use location map. angys (Talk Talk) 15:10, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

Hi

• angys*. There's still some issues regarding the maps at Template talk:Infobox building § Change to the map parameter so Kartographer works; I think it would be prudent to wait until those are worked out before adding automatic mapframes to more infoboxes – but yes, Infobox shopping mall, Infobox settlement, and all the other ones in Category:Geography and place infobox templates and its subcategories would be on the list of infoboxes to upgrade. - Evad37 [talk] 03:22, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

any thoughts?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:WikiProject_Australia - I think the default should be nla but... JarrahTree 04:44, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #016, 15 Aug 2018

Future portal tool

Discussions are underway on the design of a portal tool (user script) that will hopefully have features for modifying portals at the click of a menu item, to make editing them easier. It might do things like change the color for you, add to a selection, add a new section, move a section, and so on.

If you'd like to be involved and suggest features for the tool, please join us at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#What would you want a portal tool to be able to do?.

Progress report: upgrade of portals

As new portal components are built by our Lua gurus, those components are being used to upgrade portals. Each component automates a section of a portal in a particular way.

The sections that are mostly upgraded so far are the Intro, and the Associated Wikimedia section.

The sections currently undergoing upgrade are: Selected image, Categories, and the Intro.

The Intro? Isn't that done already?

Yes, and no.

The upgrade of the excerpt in intros is mostly complete (there are about 70 non-standard portals that still need it).

Now we are doing another upgrade of intros in the form of adding a panoramic picture at the top of the intro, on portals for which such a picture is available on Commons:. Dozens of panoramas have been added so far, and they are really starting to affect the look of portals — the portals that have them look really good.

Regions are the most likely subjects to have panoramas, but a surprising number of other subjects have banner-shaped pictures too. Some examples of non-geographic portals that they have been added to are:

• Portal:Underwater diving
• Portal:Sharks
• Portal:Reptiles
• Portal:Meat
• Portal:Cheese
• Portal:Cereals
• Portal:Tea
• Portal:Milk
• Portal:Wheat
• Portal:Rice
• Portal:Clothing

Speaking of pictures, several hundred Selected image sections have been upgraded to include image slideshows.

Progress report: design

The push for automation continues, with new components under continuous testing in the field. As problems are spotted, they are reported to our programmers, who have done a fantastic job of keeping up with bug reports and fixing the relevant Lua modules fast. I am highly impressed.

Construction time on new portals is now down to as little as a minute or less. Though not in general. If you are lucky enough to spot portals that fit the profile of the new tools (their strengths), then a portal can be complete almost as soon as it is created, with the added time it takes to find and add a panorama. Source page titles are not generally standardized, and so it source pages in many cases must be entered manually. Where source page titles follow a standard naming convention, portal creation for those subjects goes quickly.

So, we still have some hurdles, but the outlook on portals is very good. New features, and many improvements to features are on the horizon. I'll be sure to report them when they become available.

What will the portal of the future look like? That is up to you!

See you on the project's talk pages.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   21:04, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #017, 22 Aug 2018

This issue is about portal creation...

Creating new portals

Myself and others have been testing and experimenting with the new components in upgrading existing portals and in building new portals. They have now been applied in hundreds of portals.

The templates are ready for general use for portal creation.

They are still a bit buggy, but the only way we are going to work the rest of the bugs out is by using them and reporting the bugs as we come across them.

I look forward to seeing what new portals you create!

Be sure to report bugs at WT:WPPORTD.

The main portal creation template is {{box portal skeleton}}.

Portal creation tips

After starting a portal using {{box portal skeleton}}...

1. Placing a panorama (banner picture) at the top of the intro section is a nice touch, and really makes a portal look good. {{box portal skeleton}} doesn't automatically insert panoramas. So, you will need to do that by hand. They can be found at Commons:. For some examples, check out Portal:Sharks, Portal:Cheese, and Portal:Florence
2. The search term provided in the Did you know? and In the news sections is very basic and rarely matches anything. It is best to replace that term with multiple search arguments, if possible (separate each argument with a pipe character). For example, in Portal:Capital punishment, see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portal:Capital_punishment&diff=855255361&oldid=855137403 Searches in templates use Lua search notation.
3. Check the In the news and Did you know? sections for mismatches. That is, sometimes entries come up that shouldn't be displayed. If there are any, refine the search strings further, so they don't return such results.
4. Finish each portal you've created before creating a new one. We don't want unfinished portals sitting around.

Need a laugh?

Check out the Did you know? section on Portal:Determinism.    — The Transhumanist   02:21, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Mapframe for infoboxes

Hello Evad37! Thank you for the magic you did at {{Infobox building}}. :-) A quick question, if you edit a random page which uses Infobox building, you will notice that in the edit mode, when clicking preview, the map has additional zoom-in/zoom-out buttons, and also zooms in/out when scrolling over the map. Would you know if this functionality could be made available in the viewing mode as well? Maybe at least the zoom buttons? Best regards, Rehman 10:48, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T202793

According to the documentation that is meant to be the behaviour: code will insert a simple interactive map ... with the ability to maximize it by either double-clicking the map or clicking the icon in the right corner. Which might mean the documentation is outdated, e.g. static maps might be needed for performance reasons... except that on test2wiki (a test site running the latest version of the software) dynamic thumbnails are shown when viewing a page, e.g. [15]. I've asked for clarification on Phabricator; See also mw:Help talk:Extension:Kartographer § Map maximizing on single click? - Evad37 [talk] 03:35, 25 August 2018 (UTC)

Thank you. I've subscribed to that task. Best regards, Rehman 13:04, 25 August 2018 (UTC)

Server switch warning in tech report

Regarding the upcoming tech report. Do you think the visibility of the server switch should be higher? I'm not sure if the "up to" one hour editing outage is realistic or a worst-case scenario. ☆ Bri (talk) 16:11, 25 August 2018 (UTC)

I think the "up to" one hour is probably an overly-cautious estimate; in 2017 they were only expecting 20 to 30 mins[16], and similarly 15 to 20 mins in 2016[17] - Evad37 [talk] 02:03, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Timeless Newsletter • Issue 2

Newsletter • August 2018

The second issue of the Timeless newsletter is out.

The news: Themes are coming to Timeless! Your infobox and navbox templates in particular are probably going to look absolutely horrible in the new built-in night mode.

For more information, background, plans and progress updates, please see the full issue on Meta, complete with a ridiculous list of phabricator task links, gratuitous mention of other skins, and me complaining about the current state of MediaWiki skinning in general.

-— Isarra ༆ 01:48, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

DateCountdown

If you want to move my DateCountdown widget to shared space go ahead. It could be a community tool. ☆ Bri (talk) 04:17, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #018, 04 Sept 2018

Bug hunt!

As you know, portals are now supported by a number of new templates, which are in turn supported by some new Lua modules.

Those templates and modules are being put to the test, in the new portals that have been created since this WikiProject rebooted, plus a number of existing portals that have been revamped.

The new portals, and revamped ones, can be found at Category:Single-page portals.

Please browse the new portals at your leisure, and report any and all problems that you spot. Post bug and other portal problem reports at WT:WPPORTD. Please report bugs, quirks, awkward aspects, or anything weird or off that you notice. Compliments and suggestions are also welcome. :)

When you report a bug, please indicate the portal's name, the section that the problem appeared in, and the name of the article appearing (first) in the section with the problem. Most problems will likely be encountered in the Selected general articles" section, due to quirks in a displayed article's wikicode that the lua modules don't handle yet. Your help in spotting those is of utmost value. Thank you.

Don't delete portal subpages just yet

For portals that have been converted to the single-page design, we are not deleting their subpages at this time, because we are working on ways to harvest the data from those pages. For example, the Selected picture subpages include filenames and captions that would be valuable for the image slideshows. Please don't delete portal subpages, for now. They'll be slated for d-batch speedy deletion after harvesting. Thank you.

Development notes

We are currently testing a feature added to {{Transclude files as random slideshow}} that allows it to accept both sourcepages and filenames. Courtesy of Evad37. This will pave the way for harvesting files and their captions from portal subpages, for use in image slideshows.

We need your help

The bulk of the work is being done by a handful of editors. But we can't do it all. We need help with spotting bugs, refining the search parameters in new/revamped portals (in the "Did you know..." and "In the news" sections), adding images to slideshows for a broader selection (they default to showing the images on the root article page but are capable of showing so much more), adding panoramic pictures at the top of the intro section of region portals (cities, counties, states, provinces, countries, continents, and other regions), to name but a few task types.

It is rewarding to be a part of the growing portal phenomenon. And you get to see its expansion and refinement up close.

Feel free to join in on the fun. ;)

Thank you,    — The Transhumanist   06:50, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Template:Transclude files as random slideshow/testcases

Hi! I patrol Category:Templates with missing files and just wanted to quick let you know that your template is currently showing up in there due to a missing file(s) somewhere. I attempted to fix it myself, though I'm not finding what's causing the error. No worries and you're welcome to just leave it the way it is if you like, just thought I'd let you know in case it would help with testing process in some way. All the best, Katniss May the odds be ever in your favor ♥ 21:08, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

@KatnissEverdeen:  Fixed [18]. This was a bug in Module:Random slideshow that was removing |thumb from transcluded images, but did not take account of |thumbnail also being a valid syntax. So

[[File:Cat_playing_with_a_lizard.jpg|thumbnail|alt=Cat playing with a lizard|Cat playing with a lizard]]

from Cat#Play got turned into

File:Cat_playing_with_a_lizard.jpgnail|alt=Cat playing with a lizard|Cat playing with a lizard

instead of

File:Cat_playing_with_a_lizard.jpg|alt=Cat playing with a lizard|Cat playing with a lizard

Thanks for letting me know, so I could investigate and fix this error. - Evad37 [talk] 02:47, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

@Evad37: When Module:Excerpt had a similar problem, I also had to check for frame and framed. Not sure if that applies here too. Certes (talk) 07:49, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Hi Evad37, thanks for fixing that. Oddly, it appears another one of your templates now has an error as well, Template:Transclude list item excerpts as random slideshow/testcases. Not sure if it's the same issue though or now. Thanks, Katniss May the odds be ever in your favor ♥ 15:40, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Article assessment advice

Hello, I noticed you assessed Imaqtpie as Start class. It is one of my first articles I have created, so I was wondering if you would please give me some advice on how to improve it to C class or better? I have already taken a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Video_games/Assessment#Quality_scale but I am still confused. Thank you. Derek M (talk) 17:26, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

@Derek M: You'll need to ask Lee Vilenski, since they were the one to actually assess that article [19] - Evad37 [talk] 23:49, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

Wow, I'm so sorry I don't even know how I thought it was you. Derek M (talk) 01:12, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

You are the King of Assessment!    — The Transhumanist   04:15, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	XFDcloser is just brilliant. Nothing more to say.. Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:17, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

JS/WP questions

I'm writing a user script.

I need to preview a page rather than save (submit).

How do you do that?

(More importantly, how do you find that information? I couldn't find it in the API) (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php)

I look forward to your replies.    — The Transhumanist   23:33, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: API documentation is at mw:API; you can also experiment with the API at Special:APISandbox (but beware that edit actions do still get made on-wiki). As for previewing a page, you can use action:'parse' as described at mw:API:Parsing wikitext. I've got some examples in User:Evad37/rater.js (line 766) and User:Evad37/XFDcloser/v3.js (line 2120). - Evad37 [talk] 02:17, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Those seem rather complex. So much so, that I can't make heads or tails of them. Isn't there a simple one-line command to make the current page show in preview mode? Making the page save is as simple as:

document.editform.submit();

One would hope there would be something simple like that for previewing.    — The Transhumanist   06:55, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: Assuming you're on a edit page, you could get the script to simulate a click of the show preview button: $('#wpPreviewWidget > input').click();. Which then causes the page to reload, so you can't do anything with the script after that point (or at least not easily) - Evad37 [talk] 07:04, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

Thank you. That sounds perfect for direct editing – I will definitely use it. By this point in the process, the script has already done its thing, leaving just one task left to do for the editor: inspect the page before saving.

As for editing multiple pages, what I'd like to do is be able to Ctrl+click on a bunch of different redlinks and have the script run in each tab that is created by doing so, insert some text, and then show a preview as if the preview button was clicked. That is, each tab should have a preview in it ready and waiting for me to go and look at. Then I could just inspect the page and click "Save". Ctrl+clicking on redlinks works fine for creating new tabs, but the script doesn't run in any of them. Each edit window is empty, with the cursor waiting at the beginning of the editing frame.    — The Transhumanist   07:25, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

So basically you want the script to auto-run if the page does not exist, and is in Portal: namespace, and is not a subpage? - Evad37 [talk] 07:30, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

When a "Creating" page is opened in a tab, and doesn't have a forward slash in its title.

When you click on a redlink regularly, you get a page with a <title> that starts with "Creating", and the page has an empty edit window on it. When you Ctrl+click on that redlink, you get a tab; then, when you go to that tab, there's the same page I just described. So, there appears to be a page that exists as soon as you go there. It looks like a perfectly viable html page to me. The thing I don't understand is, why the script runs in the first instance of that page, and not the second.    — The Transhumanist   07:56, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

What you've got in User:The_Transhumanist/QuickPortal.js is working for me as-is, regardless of whether I click a red link, ctrl-click it, or type it in the url bar - Evad37 [talk] 08:22, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

When you cltrl-click on a redlink, are you switched to the new tab immediately? When I have "When you open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately" checked marked in preferences (Firefox), the script runs. But I'd like to click on a bunch of redlinks without going to them, so I leave that checkbox unchecked. Have you tried that? What happens?    — The Transhumanist   04:10, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

I just tried ctrl-click on a portal redlink in Chromium (a Chrome clone), with the switch-immediately feature turned off, and the script did not run. Apparently, I must be in the tab for the script to run. What about you? Does the script run when you open a tab that you are not immediately switched to?    — The Transhumanist   04:22, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

After I added your line for previewing the page, it worked, but each tab went into an endless loop, because the script ran again each time a new edit page was presented (which is what happens with preview). So I added a conditional so it would only continue if the page was empty, and a weird thing happened. The tabs went into an endless loop until I looked at them. Meaning they were empty until I actually went there. Bizarre. I have no idea why it is behaving that way. But, on the bright side, I'm further along with this thing than I was. Thank you.

I'll tinker around with it some more, and will let you know how far I get.    — The Transhumanist   05:12, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

The problem went away after turning wikEd off. Works like a charm. Thank you for your help.    — The Transhumanist   05:38, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

Transclude short description

Hi Evad37, How difficult would it be to write a template that transcludes the short description of an article as an annotation? The usage would be something like {{Transclude short description|Foo}} and should return A metasyntactic variable commonly used in template discussions. It would mainly be useful to annotate a list of article links, so {{Annotated link|Foo}} would return [[Foo]] – A metasyntactic variable commonly used in template discussions which would be useful in list articles like indexes. Part of it should be easy, as manually edited short descriptions are generally near the top of the article and use a consistent and straightforward syntax, {{short description|A metasyntactic variable commonly used in template discussions}}, but some are embedded in infoboxes and disambiguation notice templates. Even just working with the standard short description template would be useful. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 10:05, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

For articles using the standard short description template it should be easy enough. But if its within a template then its more difficult and expensive (in terms of Lua usage), and may not be practical. - Evad37 [talk] 00:11, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, Could you put the basic case on your list of things to consider doing if you ever have an idle moment? I could probably manage the annotated link from there. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 06:50, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

@Pbsouthwood: Actually, {{Template parameter value}} already exists and will work for this, e.g. for Achilles: {{Template parameter value|Achilles|short description|1|1}} → Greek mythological hero - Evad37 [talk] 05:34, 13 September 2018 (UTC)

Seek, and ye shall find, Ask the right person and ye shall be directed to existing stuff, saving a lot of seeking time. Thanks, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 05:42, 13 September 2018 (UTC).

AWB task request: please help with the backlog

Hey...

If you have AWB laying around, please dust it off and crank it up! ;)

We have a growing backlog!

There are now 538 portals. Of those, 52 are of the new design.

Many of the new portals are orphaned or near orphaned, and need links pointing to them:

1. A portal link at the bottom of corresponding navigation footer template. E.g., Template:Machines for Portal:Machines. See examples of a portals link at the bottom of Template:Robotics and Template:Forestry.
2. A {{Portal}} box in the See also section of the corresponding root article for each portal. If there is no See also section, create one and place the portal template in that. (Rather than placing them in an external links section -- they're not external links).
3. A {{Portal}} template placed at the top of the category page corresponding to each portal.

To make a list of corresponding templates, you can use AWB's make list feature to make a list of the pages in Category:Single-page portals. Then you copy that list to a sandbox, and replace \nPortal: with ]]\n* [[Template:, using WP:wikEd. That will give you a list of templates to work on. Then you set skip in AWB to skip the ones that already have the portal link.

To make a list of corresponding root articles, make a list of portal links, and then remove "Portal:" from the links.

To make a list of category links to process, make sure you use a leading colon (:) in the category links, like this: [[:Category:Blue Öyster Cult]].

All new and revamped portals can be found at Category:Single-page portals.

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   20:44, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.13 18 September 2018

Hello Evad37, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

The New Page Feed currently has 2700 unreviewed articles, up from just 500 at the start of July. For a while we were falling behind by an average of about 40 articles per day, but we have stabilised more recently. Please review some articles from the back of the queue if you can (Sort by: 'Oldest' at Special:NewPagesFeed), as we are very close to having articles older than one month.

Project news

• The New Page Feed now has a new "Articles for Creation" option which will show drafts instead of articles in the feed, this shouldn't impact NPP activities and is part of the WMF's AfC Improvement Project.

As part of this project, the feed will have some larger updates to functionality next month. Specifically, ORES predictions will be built in, which will automatically flag articles for potential issues such as vandalism or spam. Copyright violation detection will also be added to the new page feed. See the projects's talk page for more info.

• There are a number of coordination tasks for New Page Patrol that could use some help from experienced reviewers. See Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Coordination#Coordinator tasks for more info to see if you can help out.

Other

• A new summary page of reliable sources has been created; Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources/Perennial sources, which summarizes existing RfCs or RSN discussions about regularly used sources.

Moving to Draft and Page Mover

• Some unsuitable new articles can be best reviewed by moving them to the draft space, but reviewers need to do this carefully and sparingly. It is most useful for topics that look like they might have promise, but where the article as written would be unlikely to survive AfD. If the article can be easily fixed, or if the only issue is a lack of sourcing that is easily accessible, tagging or adding sources yourself is preferable. If sources do not appear to be available and the topic does not appear to be notable, tagging for deletion is preferable (PROD/AfD/CSD as appropriate). See additional guidance at WP:DRAFTIFY.
• If the user moves the draft back to mainspace, or recreates it in mainspace, please do not re-draftify the article (although swapping it to maintain the page history may be advisable in the case of copy-paste moves). AfC is optional except for editors with a clear conflict of interest.
• Articles that have been created in contravention of our paid-editing-requirements or written from a blatant NPOV perspective, or by authors with a clear COI might also be draftified at discretion.
• The best tool for draftification is User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js^(info). Kindly adapt the text in the dialogue-pop-up as necessary (the default can also be changed like this). Note that if you do not have the Page Mover userright, the redirect from main will be automatically tagged as CSD R2, but in some cases it might be better to make this a redirect to a different page instead.
• The Page Mover userright can be useful for New Page Reviewers; occasionally page swapping is needed during NPR activities, and it helps avoid excessive R2 nominations which must be processed by admins. Note that the Page Mover userright has higher requirements than the NPR userright, and is generally given to users active at Requested Moves. Only reviewers who are very experienced and are also very active reviewers are likely to be granted it solely for NPP activities.

List of other useful scripts for New Page Reviewing

Twinkle provides a lot of the same functionality as the page curation tools, and some reviewers prefer to use the Twinkle tools for some/all tasks. It can be activated simply in the gadgets section of 'preferences'. There are also a lot of options available at the Twinkle preferences panel after you install the gadget. In terms of other gadgets for NPR, HotCat is worth turning on. It allows you to easily add, remove, and change categories on a page, with name suggestions. MoreMenu also adds a bunch of very useful links for diagnosing and fixing page issues. User:Equazcion/ScriptInstaller.js(info): Installing scripts doesn't have to be complicated. Go to your common.js and copy importScript( 'User:Equazcion/ScriptInstaller.js' ); into an empty line, now you can install all other scripts with the click of a button from the script page! (Note you need to be at the ".js" page for the script for the install button to appear, not the information page) User:TheJosh/Scripts/NewPagePatrol.js(info): Creates a scrolling new pages list at the left side of the page. You can change the number of pages shown by adding the following to the next line on your common.js page (immediately after the line importing this script): npp_num_pages=20; (Recommended 20, but you can use any number from 1 to 50). User:Primefac/revdel.js(info): Is requesting revdel complicated and time consuming? This script helps simplify the process. Just have the Copyvio source URL and go to the history page and collect your diff IDs and you can drop them into the script Popups and it will create a revdel request for you. User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js(info): Creates a "Page Curation" link to Special:NewPagesFeed up near your sandbox link. User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/deletionFinder.js: Creates links next to the title of each page which show up if it has been previously deleted or nominated for deletion. User:Evad37/rater.js(info): A fantastic tool for adding WikiProject templates to article talk pages. If you add: rater_autostartNamespaces = 0; to the next line on your common.js, the prompt will pop up automatically if a page has no Wikiproject templates on the talk page (note: this can be a bit annoying if you review redirects or dab pages commonly).

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:11, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Signpost update

The publication date for the Signpost is fast approaching, and your section seems to need some amount of work until it's publishable. Please continue working! Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 15:10, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

current

next meetup thingoes for next event in perth are a real mess - and you are so good at fixing it up - 16th cancelled till following week - any chance to have a once over of all the points of mistakes etc? if you are able much appreciated. thanks JarrahTree 23:49, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious

Five years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:53, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #019, 22 Sept 2018

Portals progress report

Don't blink. You might miss something.

As of a few days ago, portals had doubled in about a month and a half.

Also, there were 98 incompleted portals in Category:Portals under construction. Now there are just 43.

The WikiProject page has been thoroughly revised

The goals, plans, and task sections have all been updated.

Orphaned portals need a home...

Many new portals are still orphans, and need links pointing to them:

1. A portal link at the bottom of corresponding navigation footer template. E.g., Template:Machines for Portal:Machines. See examples of a portals link at the bottom of Template:Robotics and Template:Forestry.
2. A {{Portal}} box in the See also section of the corresponding root article for each portal. If there is no See also section, create one and place the portal template in that. (Rather than placing them in an external links section -- they're not external links).
3. A {{Portal}} template placed at the top of the category page corresponding to each portal.

All new and revamped portals can be found at Category:Single-page portals.

Portal:Contents/Portals

This is the main list of portals.

Nearly 2,000 of the new portals need to be listed here.

They can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet. Instructions are included there.

Customized Portal Rating system is now in place

Portals now have a new rating system of their own designed specifically to support portal evaluation! We were trying to use the standard assessment system for articles, but that doesn't fit portals very well.

Many thanks to Evad37, Waggers, AfroThundr3007730, SMcCandlish, Tom, BrendonTheWizard, and Pbsouthwood for their work and input on this.

The new system can be found at the top of all portal talk pages, in the WikiProject portals box. Those with "???" ratings need to be assessed, which makes up most of the older portals.

Most of the new portals were started out with an initial "Low" level of importance when their talk pages were created. Those deserving higher importance should be promoted as you come across them.

Improving the new portals

The starting point for new portals included minimal parameters and content, in the form of default values in the template(s) used for their creation.

Embellishing embedded search strings

So, for the search strings in the "Did you know..." and "In the news" sections, this was the magic word {{PAGENAME}}, which represents the portal's name. Unfortunately, the resulting term is alway capitalized, which limits its effectiveness as a search string for anything but proper nouns. Results for those two sections can be improved, by replacing the "PAGENAME" magic word with multiple search strings, and search strings that begin with lower case letters. There is no inherent limit as to how many search parameters may be included. Lua search notation is used. The more general the subject, the more subtopic search terms you may want to include. For example, on Portal:Avengers (comics), {{PAGENAME}} turned up nothing. But, when more parameters were added, as in the wikicode below...

{{Transclude selected recent additions | {{PAGENAME}} | Iron Man | Spiderman | Antman | Hawkeye | The Hulk | Incredible Hulk | David Banner | Captain America | Scarlet Witch | Black Widow | Tony Stark | Nick Fury | Age of Ultron | Infinity War | months=36 | header={{Box-header colour|Did you know... }}|max=6}}

... that returned several results in the portal's DYK section.

Be sure you make the improvements to both the DYK section and the "In the news" section, as they both require the search strings.

Expanding the slideshow contents

The default starting selection for the image slideshow in most new portals is whatever images happen to be in the corresponding root article (via the PAGENAME magic word). You can improve image slideshows by adding more sourcepages and filenames as parameters in the "Selected images" section of portals.

See Template:Transclude files as random slideshow/doc for instructions.

More exciting things are to come...

Portals used to take about 6 hours or more to create. Now, for subjects that have particular navigation support, we've got that down to about one minute each, with even more content displayed than ever. True, that means the new portals pick you, rather than the other way around. Creating a specific portal that doesn't happen to have the requisite navigation support is still pretty time consuming. But, we are working on extending our reach beyond the low-hanging fruit.

And efforts are ongoing to keep shaving time off of the creation process. Eventually, we may get it down to seconds each.

In addition to improving automation, we're always looking for new features and improvements that we can add to portals, and there is plenty of potential to expand on the standard design so that new portals are even better right out of the starting gate. Additional designs are also possible.

On the horizon, there are many more portals waiting to be created. And we can expect to see at least a few more section types emerge. I never expected slideshows, for example, especially not for excerpts. Who knows where innovation will take us next?

Keep up the great work everyone.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   07:06, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost (September)

Hi Evad. Saw that you started a Technology report for September issue. Will it be possible to make it ready for copyedit soon? Say in next 24-48 hours? I'd like to publish in month of September. ☆ Bri (talk) 14:27, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

@Bri: Yeah, I'll finish it off in the next few hours - Evad37 [talk] 01:41, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

Issue with Signpost Publishing Script

The SPS does not appear in my pull-down menu. I had no issue last month. I jumped on another computer (different OS/ different browser) and it still doesn't appear. I had no problem last month and I cannot figure out what changed. Chris Troutman (talk) 23:04, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

@Chris troutman: I haven't made any changes to the script. You could try temporarily removing every line except importScript('User:Evad37/SPS.js'); from your common.js and then see if it's there when you go to the newsroom, in case one of the other scripts you are using is interfering. - Evad37 [talk] 23:53, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

That fixed it. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:45, 1 October 2018 (UTC)

Do you have time and are interested in creating a new user script for WP:VG (and maybe others)?

Hi there. I raised an idea at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games#Semi-automating cover upload? and would need someone very skilled (like you!) to implement it. Basically, it would be a upload- and edit-script that works like this:

1. Locate a video game article that has {{infobox video game}} but not infobox image (cover image).
2. Click a link in the "tools" box that runs this script (I'll call it "Covery" temporarily but you can choose whatever name you want). If #1 is not the case, it will not run, else:
3. Covery™ then asks you to either upload an image or enter an URL to an image and input a name for the image (optional)
4. The image is uploaded temporarily and resized if needed to comply with WP:NFCC
5. Covery then uploads the image to Wikipedia and automatically tags it with {{non-free video game cover}} and {{Non-free use rationale video game cover}}, using the values from {{infobox video game}} to fill in Developer= and Publisher= and the article's title for article=
6. The script then edits the article and add the cover to {{infobox video game}}
7. Last but not least, the script would check the talk page and see whether {{WikiProject Video games}} has the Cover=yes set and remove the parameter if true.

Do you think you can create such a script? And more importantly, would you be willing to? Regards SoWhy 09:40, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

@SoWhy: That seems feasible. I'm not too familiar in dealing images in scripts, but there is an API for file uploads. And it looks like it might be possible to do resizing before uploading the image... I'm not entirely sure, but even if I can't get that part working the script could put {{Non-free reduce}} on the file description page. Do we have any firm guidance on what the threshold would be for resizing? The NFCC guidelines are vague, just requiring "Low- rather than high-resolution". - Evad37 [talk] 13:34, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

Great! As for resizing, I think the rule is that the resolution should not be higher than 100,000 px (0.1 MP). With cover art, this usually translates to something like 250 x 375 (when the ratio is 2:3). The script can probably determine the ratio and then extrapolate the highest possible allowed resolution, no? That said, this is not the most pressing concern since, as you say, the script could tag the file and DatBot or similar will do the resizing. Other option would be to simply reject files with a larger resolution, forcing users to supply the right size. Regards SoWhy 14:03, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

@SoWhy:  Done, see User:Evad37/Covery. Report any problems at User talk:Evad37/Covery.js. Cheers, Evad37 [talk] 15:20, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	For your tool User:Evad37/rater.js Dreamy Jazz 🎷 talk to me | my contributions 21:16, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	For the genius creation that is User:Evad37/Covery and the help you provide all the time. If you ever reconsider RFA, I'd be happy to nominate you. Regards SoWhy 12:23, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #020, 12 Oct 2018

Whew, a lot has been happening.

A bit of defending of the portals has been needed. But, most activity recently has been directed upon maintenance and development of existing portals.

The majority of portals now use the new design, about 2400 of them, leaving around 1200 portals that still employ the old style.

Newest portals

• Aceh
• Aegean Sea
• Arthur Wellesley
• Azores
• Bashkortostan
• Birmingham
• Black Sea
• Canary Islands
• Carpathian Mountains
• Caucasus
• Columbia River
• Davao City
• Dnieper
• Easter Island
• Exploration
• Galápagos Islands
• Glasgow
• Great Wall of China
• Guangdong
• Kaliningrad Oblast
• Kanpur
• Kigali
• Kuril Islands
• Kuwait City
• Leeds
• Lhasa
• Loire Valley
• Lucknow
• Lviv
• Map projections
• Marseille
• Midwestern United States
• Missouri River
• Multan
• Mysore
• Niger River
• Northeast India
• Odessa
• Orchestras
• Panama Canal
• Peshawar
• Polynesia
• Poznań
• Pretoria
• Rat Pack
• Sammy Davis Jr.
• Shandong
• South China Sea
• Southern United States
• Suez Canal
• Svalbard
• Tatarstan
• Tigris River
• Visakhapatnam
• Volga River
• Western Ghats
• Western United States
• Yellowstone National Park
• Yosemite National Park

Please inspect these portals, and report problems or suggest improvements at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

MfDs

Since the last issue of this newsletter, Nineteen portals were nominated for deletion. All posted by the same person.

Two portals were deleted.

One resolved as "no consensus".

Sixteen resolved as "keep".

Links to the archived discussions are provided below:

1. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Air France
2. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Alexander Korda
3. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:August Derleth
4. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Average White Band
5. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bee-eaters
6. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Ben E. King
7. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Benny Goodman
8. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bill Bryson
9. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Billy Idol
10. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Billy Ocean
11. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bob Hope
12. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Bobbie Rosenfeld Award
13. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Body piercing
14. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Canton, Michigan
15. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Compostela Group of Universities
16. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Diplo
17. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Diversity of fish
18. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Pebble Beach
19. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Peter, Paul and Mary

Many thanks to those who participated in the discussions.

To watch for future MfD's, keep in mind that the Portals WikiProject is supported by automatic alerts. You can see them at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals#Article alerts: portals for deletion at MfD

Creation criteria

There was also some discussion of creation criteria for portals. The result was that one of the participants in the discussion reverted the portal guidelines to the old version, which has the minimum number of articles for a portal included in there: "about 20 articles", a guideline that was in place since 2009.

Many of the portals that existed prior to April 2018 do not have that many (being limited to however many subpages the portal creator created), and therefore, these portals need to be upgraded to the new design (which automatically provides many articles for display). Using the new design, exceeding 20 articles for display is very easy.

Linking to the new portals

Efforts have been underway to place links to new portals (all 2200 of them created since April).

1. Link (portal button) from corresponding category pages.  Done
2. Link from See also section on corresponding root articles. Partially implemented
3. Link from bottom of corresponding templates. Partially implemented
4. Link for each portal on Portal:Contents/Portals. Partially implemented

Your help is needed. It is easy to access the page mentioned in #1, #2, & #3 from the portals themselves.

AWBers could do these tasks even faster (that's how the category pages were done), except #4...

Item #4 above pretty much has to be done by hand. (If you can find a way to speed that up, I would be very impressed). The links needing placement can be found at Portal talk:Contents/Portals#These are not listed yet. Instructions are included there.

The conversion effort: news sections

There are still around 1200 old-style portals that have only undergone partial conversion to the new design concepts, still relying on subpages with copied/pasted excerpts that have been going stale for years, out of date (manually posted) news entries, etc.

The section currently being tackled on these is news. You can help by deleting any news section on the old-style portals that has news entries that are years old (that is the dead giveaway to a manual news section). Be sure not to delete the news sections of portals that have up-to-date news, or active maintainers. For maintainers, look at the portal's categories, and/or check the participants list at WP:WPPORT.

Eventually, conditional news sections (that appear only when news items are available for display) will be added using AWB to all portals without a news section.

News items (and even the news sections themselves) are automatically generated for portals that were created using the Basic portal start page. On those portals, there is a hidden comment at the top of the page (that you can see in the edit window), that says this:

<!-- This portal was created using subst:Basic portal start page -->

Design development

Presently, we are in the process of implementing the new design features, creating new portals with them, and installing them in existing portals.

But, what about development of new new design features?

We have a wish department.

Post your wishes at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Portals/Design#Discussions about possible cool new features, and they might come true. Many have already, and for many of those, this is where they were posted.

Cascade effect

A resource that has been elusive so far will be obtained eventually: categories. That is, the ability to pull category member links to populate a page.

Rather than populate portals directly with such links, it may be more beneficial to the encyclopedia to utilize them in navigation footers, because portals already have the ability to generate themselves based on those.

So, this would create a cascade effect: auto-gathering entries from categories, would enable the construction of new navigation footers, that would in turn support the development of new portals.

The cascade effect would also be felt by existing portals, as existing navigation footers could be expanded using the category harvesting methods, which would in turn expand the coverage of portals that access those navigation footers.

You can help by providing leads about any potential category harvesting methods. Please report anything you know about harvesting categories at WT:WPPORTD. Thank you.

Looking into the future: the quantum portal?

One idea that has been floating around is the concept of a pageless portal. That is, a portal that isn't stored anywhere, instead being generated when you click on a menu item or button.

Many of the new portals were generated by a single click, and then saved via a second click.

Therefore, it seems likely that the portals of the future will employ the one-click concept.

Because of the need for customization by users, this concept would need to be augmented with a way to integrate user contributions. This could be done in at least two ways: posting an existing portal, autogenerating one from scratch if such does not yet exist, or have a special data page for user contributions that is folded into the auto-generated portal.

How soon? That is up to you. All that is needed are persons to implement it.

Until next time...

Keep up the good work on portals. They are improving daily. Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   04:18, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

template help request

Kaya, I trying to create a template that can be used to identify each of the Noongar origins for the different spellings. that way we put a template say in quenda and show each of the regional variants in spelling names. or if there is no known word not include that group in the list. I know it'll be a quick one for you to do, I have created User:Gnangarra/sandbox/nys help with what I'd like to see. thanks in advance Gnangarra 13:30, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

@Gnangarra:  Done, see Template:Noongar spelling variants - Evad37 [talk]

@Evad37: Awesome thankyou Gnangarra 08:45, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

Interested in working on a script?

Hi Evad37,
Are you perhaps interested in working on a new stub-tagging script or on a new automatic copyvio checking script? I put two requests in over at the script requests page with some details. Feel free to decline if busy or if you think them too tedious. The copyvio one especially would be of huge benefit to the wiki. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)} 22:37, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Signpost tech report

Hi Evad37, hope all is well with you. Just wondering if you were planning to contribute to the issue 11 Technology report? ☆ Bri (talk) 20:17, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.14 21 October 2018

Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months.

Hello Evad37, thank you for your work reviewing New Pages!

Backlog

As of 21 October 2018, there are 3650 unreviewed articles and the backlog now stretches back 51 days.

Community Wishlist Proposal

• There is currently an ongoing discussion regarding the drafting of a Community Wishlist Proposal for the purpose of requesting bug fixes and missing/useful features to be added to the New Page Feed and Curation Toolbar.
• Please join the conversation as we only have until 29 October to draft this proposal!

Project updates

• ORES predictions are now built-in to the feed. These automatically predict the class of an article as well as whether it may be spam, vandalism, or an attack page, and can be filtered by these criteria now allowing reviewers to better target articles that they prefer to review.
• There are now tools being tested to automatically detect copyright violations in the feed. This detector may not be accurate all the time, though, so it shouldn't be relied on 100% and will only start working on new revisions to pages, not older pages in the backlog.

New scripts

• User:Enterprisey/cv-revdel.js^(info) — A new script created for quickly placing {{copyvio-revdel}} on a page.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)} 20:49, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #021, 24 Oct 2018

Portals have passed the 4,000 mark.

More new portals...

Here's a list of portals created since the last issue

Please inspect these portals, report problems or suggest improvements at WT:WPPORTD, or develop them further (see below). Thank you.

What's next?

There is still lots to do...

There are many subject gaps that need to be filled. This can be done by creating new portals, or by adding Selected article sections to existing portals. To create a new portal, simply place {{subst:Basic portal start page}} on an empty portal page, and click "Preview". If the portal is complete, click "Save". After you try it, come share your experience and excitement at WT:WPPORTD.

Each new portal is just a starting point. Each portal of the new design can be further developed by:

• refining the search parameters to improve the results displayed in the Did you know and In the news sections.
• adding more specific Selected articles sections, like Selected biographies.
• inserting a Recognized content section.
• adding more pictures to the image slideshow.
• placing a panoramic picture at the top of the intro section (especially for geographic portals).

Besides the new portals, there are still about 1200 portals of the old design that need to be converted to the new design.

Many portals need to be de-orphaned, by placing links to them (in the See also section of the corresponding root articles, at the bottom of the corresponding navigation footer templates, and on the corresponding category pages).

Many of the new portals still need to be listed at Portal:Contents/Portals.

Bugs keep popping up in portals. These need to be tracked down and reported at WT:WPPORTD.

Tools are needed to make developing and maintaining portals quicker and easier.

Dreaming up new features and capabilities. Innovation needs to continue, to design the portal of tomorrow, and the portal development-maintenance-system of the future. Automation!

So, if you find yourself with a little (or a lot) of free time, pick an area (or more) above and...

...dive in!    — The Transhumanist   07:04, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

P.S.: Evad, there's a bunch of new feature idea posts at WT:WPPORTD.

Template:Maplink

I see from the page history that you created Template:Maplink. I have tried a number of times to get this feature to work but have only managed to get a single point to work. I have copied one of my attempts below and would appreciate an indication of where I am doing it wrong. I do understand basic template and lua syntax but not these geodata concepts. — Frayæ (Talk/Spjall) 12:18, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

The idea of this map is to show the locations in the October 2018 United States mail bombing attempts article. If I can figure how this works I have plans to do a more complicated map showing Viking Age hillforts in the eastern Baltic on an article I have been helping with. Both rely on multiple data points that do not have Wikidata articles. — Frayæ (Talk/Spjall) 12:22, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Frayae fixed, need to set zoom so that it shows all the points. I also centered it nicely using |frame-lat= and |frame-long=. Galobtter (pingó mió) 12:26, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

|frame-width= and |frame-height= is something you also may want to change too. Galobtter (pingó mió) 12:28, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Thanks! — Frayæ (Talk/Spjall) 13:30, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Hospital maps

Hi,

Do you know why some hospitals have a red boundary around their main buildings on the mapframe maps (in the infobox) wheras others do not?

ClippednPinned (talk) 11:22, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Portals WikiProject update #022, 11 Nov 2018

Welcome AmericanAir88

Give a hearty welcome to AmericanAir88, who has adopted working on portals as one of his main purposes on Wikipedia. So far, he has created the following portals:

• Portal:Blueberries
• Portal:Olives
• Portal:Bananas
• Portal:Bone fractures
• Portal:Carbohydrates
• Portal:Cherries
• Portal:Coconuts
• Portal:Hartford Whalers
• Portal:Integumentary system
• Portal:Exercise
• Portal:Fatty acids

Way to go!

Where's Evad?

Evad disappeared from Wikipedia on October 18.

He has been, and will continue to be, sorely missed.

Hopefully, he is okay, on a Caribbean cruise or something.

The conversion continues

Portals of the old design, are slowly but surely being converted to the new single-page design.

One factor that has slowed things down is that for many sections, the section header call and section contents call are integrated into a template and buried in a lua module, locking them in on each portal. They have been that way for years.

This means that these sections can't be directly edited like the other sections on the same portal. So, search/replaces affect all the sections except those. So, upgrading headers on these portals, for example, misses the integrated sections and inadvertently results in 2 different header colors.

Before we can continue with the upgrade of these portals, the headers and section contents calls need to be restored to each portal, so that those can be edited in concert with the other sections on the portal, and worked on independently of each other.

This is underway, with a solution implemented on about 1/4 of the affected portals so far. Around 300 of them. The remaining 900 should be done within a couple weeks or so.

Going wide...

We now have banner-shaped pictures included in the introduction sections of 180 portals. The rarity of such pictures has made it difficult to find suitably narrow images for display across the tops of portals.

We have a solution for this, courtesy of FR30799386...

Most pictures are not banner-shaped. But, you can still use them as banners. Here's how:

{{Portal image banner|File:Blueberries .jpg |maxheight=120px |overflow=Hidden }}

Using both maxheight=120px and overflow=Hidden produces this:

Project's status

There are now 4,140 portals, with more being created almost daily. Prior to this project's reboot, portals were created at about the rate of 80 per year. Since April of this year, we've created about 2,600 new portals, or 32.5 years' worth at the old rate.

Of those new portals, about 3/4 of them need links leading to them. Almost all of them are linked to from the category system, but they still need links in article see also sections, at the bottom of navigation templates, and on the main portals list at Portal:Contents/Portals.

Of the 1500 portals created before the reboot, about 300 have been completely converted to the new design so far. About 1100 more have been partially converted, with intros, image slideshows, and associated wikimedia sections getting the most attention.

Discussion has resumed on the portal guidelines.

Until next issue...

See ya round the portal system!    — The Transhumanist   11:42, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

XFD closer script

Hi, this worked great but then it stopped so I deleted it and readded it later but now it wont load at all and am getting the following javascript error: index.php?title=User:Evad37/XFDcloser/v3.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript at line 1772: SyntaxError: Unexpected token ')'

Please advise, thanks Atlantic306 (talk) 13:17, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

• It works on my android phone but not on my ipad which is running ios 9.35 safari and opera, thanks Atlantic306 (talk) 19:27, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Question about Maplink

Dear Evad37, can you please see page User:Nitobus/test, and research why map number 6 (from6=moscowborders.ru/Crd/50-G.Dolgoprudny.map) does not displayed. Thank you in advance. Nitobus (talk) 19:09, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.15 16 November 2018

Chart of the New Pages Patrol backlog for the past 6 months.

Hello Evad37,

Community Wishlist Survey – NPP needs you – Vote NOW

• Community Wishlist Voting takes place 16 to 30 November for the Page Curation and New Pages Feed improvements, and other software requests. The NPP community is hoping for a good turnout in support of the requests to Santa for the tools we need. This is very important as we have been asking the Foundation for these upgrades for 4 years.

If this proposal does not make it into the top ten, it is likely that the tools will be given no support at all for the foreseeable future. So please put in a vote today.

We are counting on significant support not only from our own ranks, but from everyone who is concerned with maintaining a Wikipedia that is free of vandalism, promotion, flagrant financial exploitation and other pollution.

With all 650 reviewers voting for these urgently needed improvements, our requests would be unlikely to fail. See also The Signpost Special report: 'NPP: This could be heaven or this could be hell for new users – and for the reviewers', and if you are not sure what the wish list is all about, take a sneak peek at an article in this month's upcoming issue of The Signpost which unfortunately due to staff holidays and an impending US holiday will probably not be published until after voting has closed.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)}18:37, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

Hello, Evad37. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Where oh where is Evad?

It's been a month since the last logon. If anyone knows, please let the rest of us know.    — The Transhumanist   00:43, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

Script help

Hi Evad37, I hope that you're well! I was wondering if you would have time to help create a script for us over at peer review to help close reviews. It's not a particularly cumbersome process but can get quite time consuming if there are lots of reviews, and a script would be very helpful. I posted a description of what I think could happen at Wikipedia_talk:Twinkle#Feature_request_-_Peer_review and was wondering if this is something you could help out with? We'd be very thankful! --Tom (LT) (talk) 00:19, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Not to worry, another editor has helped out. I hope that you're well, whereever you are... --Tom (LT) (talk) 05:00, 24 November 2018 (UTC)

evad

you are missed, trust all is ok - happy christmas at least!!! JarrahTree 00:13, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

Seconded. I do hope that you're able to read this and will be ready to return to Wikipedia soon. We miss you. Certes (talk) 00:55, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

About Portal:Australian roads which you have marked for manual maintenance

Hello,

I have noticed that you marked the portal Australian roads for manual maintenance in June 2018, but this notice has not been updated in 6 months. This notice needs to be kept up to date to reflect the current status of the portal in December 2018. You can:

1. Update the date to December 2018 if you have and are continuing to maintain the portal.
2. Remove yourself as a manual maintainer, which will allow for automatic maintenance.

If you don't respond by updating the date in the notice in 2 weeks, then your name will be removed from the notice and the portal marked for automatic maintenance.

Thanks for your dedication to Portal:Australian roads. If you have questions about this message please {{ping}} me about it. Thanks and happy editing, Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 23:44, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

NPR Newsletter No.16 15 December 2018

Hello Evad37,

Reviewer of the Year

This year's award for the Reviewer of the Year goes to Onel5969. Around on Wikipedia since 2011, their staggering number of 26,554 reviews over the past twelve months makes them, together with an additional total of 275,285 edits, one of Wikipedia's most prolific users.

Thanks are also extended for their work to JTtheOG (15,059 reviews), Boleyn (12,760 reviews), Cwmhiraeth (9,001 reviews), Semmendinger (8,440 reviews), PRehse (8,092 reviews), Arthistorian1977 (5,306 reviews), Abishe (4,153 reviews), Barkeep49 (4,016 reviews), and Elmidae (3,615 reviews).
Cwmhiraeth, Semmendinger, Barkeep49, and Elmidae have been New Page Reviewers for less than a year — Barkeep49 for only seven months, while Boleyn, with an edit count of 250,000 since she joined Wikipedia in 2008, has been a bastion of New Page Patrol for many years.

See also the list of top 100 reviewers.

Less good news, and an appeal for some help

The backlog is now approaching 5,000, and still rising. There are around 640 holders of the NPR flag, most of whom appear to be inactive. The 10% of the reviewers who do 90% of the work could do with some support especially as some of them are now taking a well deserved break.

Really good news - NPR wins the Community Wishlist Survey 2019

At #1 position, the Community Wishlist poll closed on 3 December with a resounding success for NPP, reminding the WMF and the volunteer communities just how critical NPP is to maintaining a clean encyclopedia and the need for improved tools to do it. A big 'thank you' to everyone who supported the NPP proposals. See the results.

Training video

Due to a number of changes having been made to the feed since this three-minute video was created, we have been asked by the WMF for feedback on the video with a view to getting it brought up to date to reflect the new features of the system. Please leave your comments here, particularly mentioning how helpful you find it for new reviewers.

---

If you wish to opt-out of future mailings, go here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:14, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Timeless Newsletter • Issue 3

Newsletter • December 2018

Welcome to the third issue of the Timeless newsletter, complete with a somewhat dubious explanation of where I've been all this time.

Somewhat dubious explanation of where I've been all this time:

I suffered a rather bad concussion in October, which knocked me pretty much completely out of commission through November, and I'm still recovering even now. One person = bus factor of one, even though it wasn't actually a bus but a very short flight of stairs.

Updates:

• Random bugs have been fixed. More bugs have been found. For a full list of horrors, see the workboard.
• Implementing themes (T131991: the dark/night mode and winter variants of the skin) has proven far more complicated than initially thought, lacking either the extension, or preferably, some core support for this functionality. Thus:
  • I have submitted a Request for Comment proposing to merge Extension:Theme into core - this will enable skins to specify style variants as distinct options for users to select in their preferences by letting the skin specify the styles separately for each, a much neater way of implementing this than some of the existing hacks.
  • Jack Phoenix has already submitted a patch to do this. We simply need the buy-in and consensus to merge it, and to resolve whatever issues may arise from this wider review.

Comments on the RfC (MediaWiki wiki RfC page, task) or bugs, or further reports, are always appreciated.

Until next time, hopefully with no further injuries,

-— Isarra ༆ 22:35, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Back

Hi there all TPSs. I'm back after a longer than expected wikibreak. I'll be catching up with what I've missed over the next couple of weeks, but feel free to let me know if there's anything in particular you want me to look at. Cheers, - Evad37 [talk] 05:32, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

what a relief, was worried... good to see you back - have a good christmas new year! JarrahTree 05:54, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Woooo! Literally the day you left Xfdcloser borked itself, so seflishly it is good to see you back and fixing things :) Galobtter (pingó mió) 13:43, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Good to have you back, was a bit worried. Hope you are in good health. Have a good holiday season! Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 19:30, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Welcome back ☆ Bri (talk) 19:39, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Yipee ki-yay!    — The Transhumanist   02:31, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

User scripts Newsletter - Invitation

Hi. Recently, I discovered a passion for created and understanding user scripts on wikipedia, and am planning to create a monthly newsletter about new scripts and related projects (created by anyone, not for simply promoting my own), as well as currently pending user script requests, Wikipedia-related JavaScript tips/tricks, and other related information. This message was sent to you because you are listed as a member of the user script developers category. If you would like to subscribe to this upcoming newsletter, please go to User:DannyS712/subscribe to scripts and add yourself. If you have any questions, please reach out and talk to me。 --DannyS712 (talk) 05:22, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #024, 26 Dec 2018

Last issue, I mentioned there would be a flood, and so, here it is...

Portals status

We now have 4,620 portals.

And the race to pass 5,000 by year's end is on...

Can we make it?

The New Year, and the 5,001st portal, await.

( New portals are created with {{subst:Basic portal start page}} or {{subst:bpsp}} )

Evad is back!

After disappearing in mid-thread, Evad37 has returned from a longer than expected wikibreak.

Be sure to welcome him back.

Improved cropping is coming to Portal image banner

User:FR30799386 is working on making {{Portal image banner}} even better by enabling it to chop the top off an image as well as the bottom.

Many pictures aren't suitable for banners because they are too tall. Therefor, User:FR30799386 added cropping to this template, so that an editor could specify part of a picture to be used rather than the whole thing.

Upgrade of flagship portals is underway

Work has begun on upgrading Wikipedia's flagship portals (those listed at the top of the Main page).

So far, Portal:Geography, Portal:History, and Portal:Technology have been revamped. Of course, you are welcome to improve them further.

Work continues on the other five. Feel free to join in on the fun.

Spotting missing portals that are redirects

In place of many missing portals, there is a redirect that leads to "the next best topic", such as a parent topic.

Most of these were created before we had the tools to easily create portals (they used to take 6 hours or more to create, because it was all done manually). Rather than leave a portal link red, some editors thought it was best that those titles led somewhere.

The subjects that have sufficient coverage should have their own portals rather than a redirect to some other subject.

Unfortunately, being blue like all other live links, redirects are harder to spot than redlinks.

To spot redirects easily, you can make them all appear green.

Keep 'em coming!

And I'll see you next issue.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   08:08, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

There's this script I've been working on...

It is now faster to build a portal than to place the links leading to it. So, I've been trying to write a link placer.

P-link stands for "portal link".

When completed, it will place links in 3 locations leading to a portal: on the corresponding category page, in the See also section of the corresponding article, and at the bottom of the corresponding navbox footer template. This will save loads of time, and should bring portal creation including link placement, down to under a minute for each portal.

I've got the "P link on category" menu item for placing the category page link working, sort of, but I had to resort to programming it to click the menu item up to 3 times instead of once, depending where you start from. I'd like it to work with one click from all of the allowed starting locations. It's a puzzle that has me stumped - working through the problem in my head or on paper with locally stored variables, I keep running into ambiguities discerning page types that I can't figure out. Once that problem is solved, I can move on to the other 2 menu items.    — The Transhumanist   02:59, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

P.S.:pinging @Certes and FR30799386:

@The Transhumanist: One way around this would be to, when the script loads the edit page, use something like ?action=edit&plink=yes. Then, for category edit pages, you check if the plink=yes is in the URL: If so, you skip to the code that inserts the portal; if not, you add the menu item that when clicked will do that.
As for determining page types, mw.config has a bunch of page-specific values that you can use, such as current action (like "edit" or "view"), namespace number, page title (both with and without the namespace prefix), categories (so you can check if page is in Category:All disambiguation pages or Category:All set index articles) – see mw:Manual:Interface/JavaScript#Page-specific. - Evad37 [talk] 14:35, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

The problem I kept getting was endless loops. The program couldn't tell the difference between the edit page and the preview page (which is also an edit page). So, the program would make the change and activate preview, but when the preview page came up, the script ran again. And again. And again. Etc.    — The Transhumanist   08:03, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist: mw.config.get('wgAction') will result in "edit" for the initial edit page, and "submit" for the preview edit page - Evad37 [talk] 08:17, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

christmas etc

hope you had a good christmas, and will have a good new year

I have been using rater a lot recently, I must say it is beyond superlatives, it is better than I could hope for in what it can do - thanks! JarrahTree 09:22, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

 Thank you very much! And HNY to you as well - Evad37 [talk] 09:39, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

It is unbelievable in increasing accuracy and speed of assessment well beyond what I imagined is possible JarrahTree 09:42, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Question about Maplink

Dear Evad37, can you please see page User:Nitobus/test, and research why map number 6 (from6=moscowborders.ru/Crd/50-G.Dolgoprudny.map) does not displayed. Thank you in advance. Nitobus (talk) 18:45, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

@Nitobus: I have no idea what's going on. It works when used by itself [20], and works when duplicated in another from number[21], but doesn't work when just in |from6=. Which is quite weird, because there's nothing in the module code that would make |from6= behave differently to the other positions. - Evad37 [talk] 02:47, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

and it works if I remove |from66 and |from67. Nitobus (talk) 14:15, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Portals update #025, 30 Dec 2018

We can now crop the tops of pics to make banners

Before, we could only cut off the bottom of pics.

User:FR30799386 has pulled it off, and made the upgrade to {{Portal image banner}}...

So, this:

Niagara falls, from the Canadian side

Becomes this:

Niagara falls, from the Canadian side

Here's the code for the above banner:

{{Portal image banner|File:American Falls from Canadian side in winter.jpg | [[Niagara falls]], from the Canadian side |maxheight=175px |overflow=Hidden|croptop=10}}

To see it employed in a portal, check out Portal:Niagara Falls.

About that end of the year goal...

We were racing against time to create 5,000 portals by the end of the year (just for the heck of it).

We made it. We've passed the 5,000 portals mark, with time to spare!

And the 5,000th portal is Portal:Major League Baseball, by Happypillsjr.

Congratulations!

What's next?

The 10,000th portal mark. But...

...there is plenty else to do in addition to building new portals:

1. The new portals need to be linked to from the encyclopedia.
2. On those portals about subjects that are not typically capitalized, the search parameters need to be refined/expanded, to maximize the chances of Did you know and In the news items being found and displayed.
3. A Recognized content section needs to be added to each portal that has a corresponding WikiProject.
4. Addition of a category on those portals that lack a subject category.
5. Implement the portal category system, adding the appropriate categories to each portal.
6. Upgrade, and complete (as per the tasks enumerated above), the old-style portals that are not regularly maintained, which have not been converted yet (about 1,100 of them).
7. Find and fix the remaining bugs in the underlying lua modules.
8. Build portal tools (scripts) to assist in the creation, development, and maintenance of portals.
9. Build a script to help build navbox footer templates, via the harvesting of categories, amongst other methods.
10. Update the portal building instructions.
11. Update the portal guideline.
12. Refine the programming of the portals to reduce their load time.
13. Design and develop the next generation of portals and portal components.

And whatever else you can dream up.

But most of all, have a...

Happy New Year!

Evad37, thank you for your contributions to the Portals Project, and have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year.

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   11:54, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Scripts++ Newsletter – Issue 1

News and updates associated with user scripts from the past month (December 2018).

Hello everyone and welcome to the brand new Wikipedia Scripts++ Newsletter:

Scripts Submit your new/improved script here

Ale jrb's CSD Helper

Danski454: Wikidata Q numbers  • Words to watch finder  • Undo move

DannyS712: Logs link  • New pages link  • Pending changes link  • DYK claim

Opencooper's showKanji  • Abelmoschus Esculentus's Ajax Rollback with summary  • Enterprisey's user-tabs-on-contribs

Evad37's rater (released from beta)  • FR30799386's mobileUndo (now in 2.0.0)

Pending requests

• List entry annotator
• ISBN hyphenator
• Automatic American English
• Auto Copyvio checker
• ...and many more, all available at Wikipedia:User scripts/Requests

Open tasks

• Wikipedia:WikiProject JavaScript#Open tasks shows a lot of red links - lets turn them blue
• Wikipedia:User scripts/Techniques should be vastly expanded
• Wikipedia:User scripts/Guide should be improved

Miscellaneous

• Not all user scripts are listed at Wikipedia:User scripts/List. We need a better way to keep track of all of them. Thoughts?
• Please help publicize this new newsletter.

Wishing you a happy new year, --DannyS712 (talk) 20:01, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

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